" MISSING LINKS'' MILLER 437 



it is not unlikely that these latter belong to totally different, possibly chrono- 

 logically younger, human individuals. 



The opinion of French authorities has remained in agreement 

 with the early expressed view of Boiile that the jaw belonged to an 

 ape and that consequently there is no reason to regard it as a part of 

 the man whose brain case was deposited in the gravel where both 

 were found. Discussing the subject of " Man and the gibbon," 

 Ernest-Robert Lenoir remarks of the Piltdown jaw that this curious 

 bone enjoj^ed a period of great notoriety, but that since it has been 

 shown to the satisfaction of most naturalists that the fossil is only 

 a remnant of an anthropoid, silence has gradually fallen on this find. 



Turning to other European countries we find that the dissociation 

 of the jaw from the skull has been upheld by Ramstrom in Sweden, 

 Mollison and Schwalbe in Germany, and Giuffrida-Ruggeri in Italy. 

 On the contrary, Kleinschmidt, in Germany, accepts all the frag- 

 ments as parts of one individual and finds that the cast of the mandi- 

 ble clearly shows the horseshoe-shaped form of the human jaw. An 

 entirely new opinion has been put forward in Italy by Fabio Fras- 

 setto. According to him the jaw and skull came from one individual, 

 a human being with an oranglike mandible. 



By most writers who do not regard the mandible as human, this 

 bone and its teeth have been compared with the corresponding parts 

 of living great apes. The nearly unanimous conclusion has been that 

 both the bone and the molars possessed the characters which could be 

 looked for in an extinct member of the genus now represented by the 

 African chimpanzees. Support of another view (apparently first sug- 

 gested by Sera in 1917) has been brought forward by Doctor 

 Hrdlicka. He regards the jaw and teeth as those " of either a human 

 precursor or very early man " (Amer. Journ. Phys. Anthrop., vol. 5, 

 p. 346) , but he finds in the molars a striking resemblance to the corre- 

 sponding teeth of extinct apes called Dryopithecus^ whose fossil re- 

 mains have been discovered in southern France and southern Ger- 

 many. After tabulating the measurements of some of the teeth of 

 these extinct apes (Amer. Journ. Phys. Anthrop., vol. 6, p. 214, May, 

 1923), he says: 



The conditions shown in this table are a serious surprise. Here is a line 

 of large apes from ancient western Europe, the lower molars of which, in shape 

 and in one case even in size, resemble more than those of any other group of 

 primates or man the teeth of the Piltdown jaw. What is this? The general 

 resemblance in type and size, as well as the marked difference in relative 

 dimensions of the fossil teeth in question to and from those of man have been 

 brought to our attention by W. Branco [in 1S9S] ; but their remarkable close- 

 ness in the relative and in one case also in the absolute dimensions to the teeth 

 of the Piltdown jaw is a new fact. "What Is its meaning? Ai'e the resemblances 

 merely accidental, or do they have deeper foundation? . . . The Piltdown 

 being was not a Dryopithecus, but may have had ancestral relations with some 



24034—29 29 



