May 12, 192 1] 



NATURE 



323 



the judge listens to what Sir E. Ray Lankester 

 and Mr. T. Raid Moir have to say for the worked 

 flints from the Pliocene deposits of East Anglia. 

 A decided verdict is given against them, because, 

 so the judge asserts, it is impossible to tell 

 Nature's handiwork from that of man ! For the 

 learned judge that ancient stone culture known to 

 experts as Chellean, which many archaeolo- 

 gists regard as marking a high point in man's 

 skill as a worker in flint, is the earliest that can 

 be attributed to human hands. He admits that 

 there must be preceding and more primitive stone 

 cultures, but Prestwich and Harrison, and also 

 M. Rutot who has espoused the cause of eoliths 

 "by the publication of an avalanche of pamphlets," 

 were, and are, gravely in error. 



Then the famous Piltdown case comes up ; our 

 eminent geologist. Dr. Smith Woodward, finds 

 himself very severely handled by our equally 

 eminent geological judge. Our British colleague 

 is censured, in the first place, for giving the name 

 Eoanthropus — " dawn man " — to the being dis- 

 covered by Mr. Charles Dawson at Piltdown ; 

 this name, in the judge's opinion, should have 

 been reserved for the early pygmy humanoid form 

 which he expects may turn up any day. Here our 

 learned judge leans on the case of the horse's 

 evolution as a precedent, but it would be well for 

 the reader to remember that the evolutionary his- 

 tories of men and horses are not on "all-fours," or 

 even on "all-twos." In the second place, Dr. 

 Smith Woodward is censured for creating a new 

 genus of mankind by fitting the lower jaw of an 

 extinct chimpanzee to a human skull. Therein 

 our judge follows the lead of Prof. Waterston and 

 of Dr. Gerrit Miller. The latter has even given a 

 name to the owner of the Piltdown mandible — Fan 

 vetus. Prof. Boule does not like the American way 

 of naming chimpanzees, and so has rechristened the 

 supposed real owner of the mandible, Troglodytes 

 Dawsoni ! Nor are these all the points in the 

 Piltdown verdict ; Dr. Smith Woodward, it seems, 

 in spite of his ultra-caution, is also in error as to 

 the date at which this chimpanzee-man was, or 

 chimpanzee and man were, alive on our Sussex 

 weald. Dr. Smith Woodward, erring on the side 

 of safety, placed them just before, or at the dawn 

 of, the Chellean culture period ; the verdict now 

 delivered is that Dawson's man and Dawson's 

 chimpanzee are later — towards the close of the im- 

 mense span of time covered by the Chellean period. 

 England had a different configuration then, but 

 all are agreed that at the close of the Chellean, 

 or early in the Acheulean, period our climate was 

 much what it now is. Under such climatic con- 

 ditions one can understand how Dr. Smith Wood- 

 XO. 2689, VOL. 107] 



ward's Eoanthropus eked out a livelihood; but 

 how a chimpanzee succeeded in this feat neither 

 Prof. Boule nor Dr. Gerrit Miller has given us 

 any enlightenment. 



An equally erratic judgment is passed on the 

 fossil remains discovered by Dubois in Java. 

 Pithecanthropus is declared to be a giant gibbon 

 moving towards the human stem. Verdicts such 

 as these need not be taken so seriously as they 

 are delivered. Even expert geologists, anatomists, 

 and archaeologists will have some sense of the 

 humorous situation we have reached in human 

 palaeontology. For the benefit of those who keep 

 an anti-Darwinian eye on what is passing in our 

 anthropological courts, it may be well to explain 

 that Prof. Boule is a convinced believer in the 

 truth of evolution, is certain that man has de- 

 scended from a simian form, and is confident that 

 we shall find his ancestry in Miocene or earlier 

 deposits. He admits, too, that modern man is 

 more closely related to anthropoid apes than these 

 are to Old World monkeys. The dispute turns 

 on the particular route by which man has travelled 

 to his present estate. The only evidence 

 which will serve as guide has to be gleaned by a 

 long and arduous study of the anatomy of 

 Primates, and, with all due deference to our 

 eminent French colleague and to Dr. Gerrit Miller, 

 it is the opinion of the reviewer that neither the 

 one nor the other has shown competence in this 

 respect. 



It is true that Prof. Boule denounces as utterly 

 untrustworthy the Cuvierian axiom — namely, that 

 any animal form may be reconstructed from a 

 single bone; and yet when he comes to the man- 

 dible found at Piltdown — a bone showing exactly 

 the same degree of fossilisation as an adjacent 

 skull, of a size to fit the skull, with a texture and 

 structure of bone in keeping with the skull, but 

 with certain features in the mandible itself and 

 in the teeth which are to be seen in the lower 

 jaws of chimpanzees, and also other features 

 which are not — he promptly forgets all about the 

 falsity of Cuvier's axiom, and creates a new 

 species of chimpanzee to get rid of the difficulties 

 with which the Piltdown discovery has confronted 

 him. He forgets, too, that on an adjoining page, 

 when giving his verdict on the Heidelberg man- 

 dible, he states that, had he found the jaw with- 

 out the teeth, he would have assigned it to an 

 ape, but that, had he come across the teeth with- 

 out the jaw, he would have supposed them to be 

 human. If only the frontal bone of Neanderthal 

 man were known, it would undoubtedly be 

 assigned to a gorilla with a big brain, because it 

 is provided with a great gorilla-like supraorbital 



