74 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



pass on to a consideration of our last type of man, Eoanthropus 

 dawsoni. 



The announcement of the discovery of Eoanthropus in 1912 

 created even greater interest and excitement in anthropological 

 circles than did the discovery in the closing years of the 19th Century 

 of Pithecan hropus erectiis. The discussions and controversies to 

 which it has since given rise already constitute a considerable body 

 of literature. The discovery of a human skull in a geological horizon 

 of such antiquity as was indicated by the character of the bed con- 

 taining the Piltdown remains, exhibiting features in some respects 

 so strikingly modern and so remarkably unlike those we had expected 

 to find in a skull of late Pliocene or early Pleistocene age, could not 

 fail to arouse a wide-spread interest and cause not a little embarrass- 

 ment. Its characters were contrary to all our expectations and the 

 embarrassment was not lessened by the realisation that this well- 

 developed skull, with its marked, modern contours, possessed a 

 chinless jaw which exhibited pronounced canine teeth. Such in- 

 harmonious, conflicting characters were hard to reconcile and a number 

 of anthropologists flatly refused to believe the mandible belonged to 

 the skull, though the geological evidence in favor of the relation was 

 as a million to one. 



The reception which has been given to the Piltdown discovery 

 affords an admirable illustration of the bias which a dominant and 

 obsessive idea may give to the human mind. Piltdown man is not the 

 kind of creature man's remote ancestor was thought to be. He flew 

 in the face of all our notions in this regard. Hence the mixed recep- 

 tion he met with. Had he been another low-browed, small-brained 

 creature Irke Pithecanthropus or even had he shown the same de- 

 generate cranial characters as Neanderthal man he would have 

 caused no surprise and the relation of the mandible to the skull 

 would probably never have been called in question. But because he 

 had a brain volume and cranial characters in many respects closely 

 resembling those of modern man and yet possessed at the same time 

 a jaw with marked simian characters and pronounced canine teeth 

 he is a disturbing and disconcerting anomaly and has, as a conse- 

 quence, divided anthropologists into two conflicting schools of opinion. 

 One school following the lead of G. S. Millar, Jr., an American palae- 

 ontologist, is satisfied that the critical examination to which Millar 

 subjected a cast of the Piltdown mandible and the detailed com- 

 parison he made of the cast with the jaw of a chimpanzee, proves 

 conclusively that it is not a human jaw at all, but belonged to some 

 chimpanzee-like anthropoid to which Millar has given the name 



