THE JAW OF THE PILTDOWN MAN 

 A REPLY TO MR. GERRIT S. MILLER 



By W. P. PYCRAFT, F.Z.S., A.L.S., Memb. Roy. Anthrop. Instit. 

 Zoological Department, British Museum 



{Published by permission of the Trustees) 



SdME time ago Mr. Gerrit S. Miller of the Smithsonian Institute, 

 Washington, was requested by Dr. Ales' Hrdlicka, of the 

 United States National Museum, to compare a set of casts of 

 the skull of the Piltdown man, supplied by the British 

 Museum, with the skulls of anthropoid apes. This comparison 

 was undertaken with the perfectly legitimate purpose of arriving 

 at an independent opinion as to the conclusions arrived at by 

 Dr. Smith Woodward, and other British anthropologists, as 

 to the nature of the Piltdown remains. The result of that 

 inquiry has been to convince Mr. Miller that the cranial portions 

 of this now famous skull are unequivocally human, while the 

 lower jaw is as certainly that of a chimpanzee. 1 



In his summary 2 he tells us that " The Piltdown remains 

 include parts of a brain-case showing fundamental characters 

 not hitherto known except in members of the genus Homo, and 

 a mandible, two molars, and an upper canine showing equally 

 diagnostic features hitherto unknown, except in members 

 of the genus Pan? On the evidence furnished by these char- 

 acters the fossils must be supposed to represent either a single 

 individual belonging to an otherwise unknown extinct genus 

 (Eoanthropus) or to two individuals belonging to two now- 



1 Since this was writien Dr. W. K. Gregory, of the American Museum of 

 Natural History, has published a memoir — Studies on the Evolution of the 

 Primates — in which he throws the weight of his authority on the side of Mr. 

 Miller; but since he accepts Mr. Miller's arguments without investigating the 

 matter for himself, the objections herein set forth to Mr. Miller's contentions 

 apply equally to Dr. Gregory. 



2 "The Jaw of the Piltdown Man," Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, 

 vol. 65, No. 12. 



3 When Mr. Miller speaks of the genus Pan he means the genus Simla. 



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