WHOLE VOL. SKELETAL REMAINS OF EARLY MAN HRDLICKA 23 



The problem has been discussed ever since the time of the French 

 pioneers in prehistory. One of the foremost of the earher protago- 

 nists of Tertiary man was Gabriel de Mortillet in France ; two of the 

 latest are Reid Moir in England and Henry Fairfield Osborn in this 

 country. The claims for the tertiary existence of man rest essentially 

 on the evidence of apparently worked stones, the so-called " eoliths," 

 in strata that are believed to be of Tertiary age. 



There are two serious difficulties in the case. The first is of geo- 

 logical nature and concerns the boundary between the Quaternary 

 and the Tertiary. This boundary is not definite, and the matter is 

 complicated by the tendency of some workers to place the first glaci- 

 ation in the Tertiary. Not until the geological and paleontological 

 boundaries of the two eras are definitely and generally settled can the 

 question of Tertiary man approach a final solution. 



The second and hardly lesser difficulty relates to the apparently 

 worked stones, and consists in the uncertainties as to their true nature. 

 Many of the eoliths resemble intentionally chipped stones, but many 

 flints that evidently came to be chipped by the action of the sun, frost, 

 pressure and incidental violence of various kinds, show more or less 

 similar resemblances. Various criteria for safely distinguishing real 

 from false artifacts have been proposed, but also opposed.' There is, 

 it would seem, no valid reason against the existence of some primitive 

 form of man in the upper Tertiary; but before this problem can be 

 definitely settled, generally satisfactory conclusions both as to its 

 geological and its archeological aspects must be reached. 



THE JAW OF FOXHALL 



The preceding brief reference to the archeological side of the ques- 

 tion of Tertiary man seemed called for merely to round out the 

 subject, our real task in this work being the physical remains of man 

 himself. 



Only a few human skeletal remains have been attributed to Tertiary 

 man, and none of these has withstood the tests of critical inquiry. 



'Consult numerous contributions to the subject in L'Homme (G. de Mortillet, 

 1885, II, 289-299) ; Bull. Soc. Anthrop., Paris; Revue d'Anthropologie ; L' An- 

 thropologic ; and the periodicals of the Royal Anthropological Institute. The 

 subject is touched upon more or less in every book on human prehistory, and 

 there are many articles relating to it dispersed through the scientific journals 

 of various countries. The most recent yet still not decisive contributions to the 

 subject are those of Osborn, H. F., Recent Discoveries Relating to the Origin 

 and Antiquity of Man, Palaeobiologica, .Vol. I, No. i, pp. 189-202, 1928; and 

 Moir, J. Reid, The Antiquity of Man in East Anglia, Cambridge, 1927. 



3 



