NATURE CROWNED IN MAN 549 



Dr. Smith Woodward's conclusion that the skull requires 

 the establishment of a new genus in the family Plominidae. 

 If so, it represents another sifting out, another blind alley, 

 another breaking of the mould in which a wonderful creation 

 was cast. For the early Briton of the Sussex Weald was 

 no ancestor of ours. 



We must include in our conception of our race the fact 

 of solemn antiquity, and the fact that we had distant relatives 

 who came to nothing although possessed of very high qualities. 

 For one of the interesting conclusions at which Dr. Keith has 

 arrived, after painstaking reconstruction of the data, is that 

 the Piltdown brain was well within the modern human 

 standard of size. And this was at the Pleistocene period or 

 earlier, perhaps half a million years ago. " All the essential 

 features of the brain of modern man are to be seen in the 

 brain cast. There are some which must be regarded as 

 primitive. There can be no doubt that it is built on exactly 

 the same lines as our modern brain.'' 



" Although our knowledge of the human brain is limited 

 — there are large areas to which we can assign no definite 

 function — we may rest assured that a brain which was shaped 

 in a mould so similar to our own was one which responded 

 to the outside world as ours does. Piltdown man saw, heard, 

 felt, thought, and dreamt much as we do still. If the eoliths 

 found in the same bed of gravel were his handiwork, then 

 we can also say he had made a great stride towards that state 

 which has culminated in the inventive civilisation of the 

 modern western world" (Keith, 1915, p. 429). There is 

 something awe-inspiring in the fact of the coming and going 

 of tentative merir—oi Java, Neanderthal, and Piltdown— 

 who had their day and ceased to be, creatures not unlike 

 ourselves, but with more clay in their legs, our predecessors 



