VOL, xviii. (i) THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS g 



modern Englishman. The pecuUar features, which at once 

 distinguish this skeleton from every form of man yet disco- 

 vered, are the shapes of the leg-bones, the tibia and the fibula. 

 Professor A. Keith, in his recent first Hunterian lecture,' re- 

 marks that in many features the tibia of the Neanderthal man 

 recalled the same bone in the gorilla, but was differentiated 

 from the simian form by possessing a definitely marked ante- 

 rior border, or shin. In other palaeolithic races, and in all 

 other human types, the shin of the tibia was prominent and 

 sharp ; but in the Ipswich man, in phice of a sharp shin, there 

 was a flat surface. The significance of this feature is, at pre- 

 sent a puzzle to Professor Keith and other anatomists. It 

 does not represent, he believes, a pathological condition ; but 

 it was evidently a peculiarity connected with the gait of the 

 individual. 



The question will, naturally, be asked : Is it absolutely 

 certain that we have in this case an undisturbed interment of 

 the early palaeolithic period ? Or, is it possible, that in the 

 present instance a man of a much later type was buried in the 

 ancient strata from which his remains have been disinterred ? 

 Professor Keith, at any rate, suggests no doubts on the subject, 

 though the specimen obviously conflicts with facts hitherto 

 generally accepted by comparative anatomists. It was found, 

 he informs us, in a stratum of undisturbed chalky boulder 

 clay, the bones lying at the junction of two formations — 

 chalky boulder clay above, chalky sands below. There can, 

 he assures us, be no question of burial at a much later period, 

 because the various horizontal lines and markings were con- 

 tinued across the strata above the bones, showing that they 

 were in the condition in which they had been originally laid 

 down. The individual to whom the skeleton belonged had 

 clearly lived before the over-lying strata were formed.^ A 

 friend, who is an expert in the geology of Eastern England, 

 however, suggests to me that the skeleton belongs to a period 

 much later than the strata in which it was discovered. It was 



1. The Times, ist February, 1912. 



2. The Daily Telegraph, 27th Februar\', 1912. A useful account of the discovery, with a 

 picture of the Ipswich man, reconstructed from his remains, will be found in the Illustrated 

 London News, 23rd March, 1912. More recently the question has been discussed by Messrs 

 J. Reid Moir and Arthur Keith : "An Account of the Discovery and Characters of a Human 

 Skeleton found beneath a Stratum of Chalky Boulder Clay near Ipswich." — Journal Royal 

 Anthropological Institute, xlii. (1912), pp. 345, et seqq. 



