162 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



with the Piltdown skull. It is evident, then, from Figs. 3 and 6 that 

 if the Neanderthal or Mousterian type of skull must not be utilised 

 as a stage in the main path of evolutionary progress, there is a vast 

 gap between the stages represented by the Java man-ape and Piltdown 

 man which still requires to be filled up. From this standpoint one 

 might perhaps be bold enough to prophesy that some day a new 

 ancestral type will be discovered to fill up this very obvious hiatus 

 in the evolutionary history of the skull and brain. Until that is 

 done it will be difficult indeed for some biologists to accept the view 

 that Pithecanthropus erectiis is really an ancestor of modern inan. In 

 fact this conclusion lends support to the assertion of certain influential 

 members of the German school of anthropologists^ that the Java man- 

 ape is not to be seriously regarded as an ancestor of modern man at all. 

 Still he appears to be situated on the main evolutionary stem, and is 

 not a degenerate ofi'shoot like Neanderthal man. 



A striking fact brought out in Fig. 6 is the comparative slowness in 

 the rate of expansion of the modern European skull from the Piltdown 

 stage. This suggests to the writer that Piltdown man was qualified 

 to be the precursor of the orthognathous higher races of mankind and 

 not of the lower types of modern hominidae, for his frontal arc was 

 certainly .well developed and, as already stated above, the main differ- 

 ence between the European and aboriginal Australian types of skull 

 consists in the greater degree of filling out of the frontal cranial arc 

 (Fig. 3). Another significant fact is that there are many aboriginal 

 Australian skulls of to-day that possess a calvarial height index below 

 that of the Piltdown skull. For example Berry and Robertson^ 

 record a minimum index as low as 44-9 in a collection of one hundred 

 aboriginal Australian skulls. That is to say modern skulls are in 

 existence with a calvarial height index as low as that of the Neander- 

 thal Spy type (Spy No. 2=44-3). 



The dotted outline in Fig. 6 represents the Cro-magnon skull 

 which possessed a calvarial height index of 50. A comparative study 

 of Figs. 3 and 6 thus provides us with one fact of very far-reaching 

 importance, namely, that Piltdown man and Cro-magnon man, so 

 far as their skulls are concerned, are in their correct relative positions 

 on the main evolutionary stem, while Neanderthal man is to be defin- 

 itely regarded as a degenerate offshoot from that stem. It is to be 

 further noted that in Fig. 6 the outlines of the Piltdown and Cro- 

 magnon skulls are close up to that of the modern European skull, a 



^ I may specially mention Virchow, Krause and Waldeyer who at the historic 

 discussion at the Berlin Anthropological Society in 1895 stated their conviction that 

 the calvaria was simian. See the Verhandl. Berl. Anthrop. Gesell., 1895. 



2 Proc. Royal Soc. of Edin. Vol. XXXIV., 1913-14. 



