[cameron] 



THE HUMAN SKULL 



161 



out this fact in another communication^ where I state that "the 

 evidence certainly seems to indicate that the Java man-ape, the 

 Piltdown and Cro-magnon types were situated in that order from 

 below upwards on the main stem of the ancestral tree, with the 

 Neanderthal man as a degenerate offshoot, occurring somewhere 

 between the positions occupied by Piltdown man and Cro-magnon 

 man." It is evident, then, that one must not utilise the Neanderthal 

 specimen as representing a definite step in the evolution of the skull, 

 for his cranial outline is chronologically in the wrong place, but at the 

 same time it is both instructive and interesting to compare his skull 

 with that of other types of hominidœ. 



Fig. 6. — Shows that there is a vast gap between the stages represented by the Java 

 man-ape and Piltdown man which still requires to be filled up. This is 

 emphasised by the fact that the Piltdown and Cro-magnon outlines are 

 close up to that of the modern skull. Thus a very important "link" in 

 the evolution of the brain and skull is really still "missing." In fact that link 

 in the chain connecting the Java man-ape with Homo sapiens has still to be 

 forged in order to prove that Pithecanthropus is really an ancestral type 

 for modern man. 



On investigating the progress made between the stages of Pilt- 

 down man and modern man, several points of interest were elicited. 

 The upper outline in Fig. 6 is that of a modern European skull taken 

 at random. This was found to have a cal variai height index of fifty- 

 five, which as a matter of fact is rather low for a skull of the white 

 races, as it represented a progress of only 13 per cent when compared 



* The Canadian Magazine, Oct., 1917. 



