II52 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



bed in the Sussex Weald. Fragments of a second specimen were 

 subsequently found about two miles away. The remains were 

 associated with those of Mastodon and Woolly Rhinoceros, and with 

 crude eoliths. The gravels are referred by some to the Second Inter- 

 glacial time, in the Lower Pleistocene; but Keith regards the 

 Eoanthropus as Pliocene. The skull, pieced together from fragments, 

 is very thick-walled, with a rather steep, yet ape-like, forehead, 

 without prominent brow-ridges, and with a primitive simian-like 

 brain-case. But the lower jaw is surprising, a veritable bone of 

 contention; for the chinless front part and the canine tooth must 

 be called simian, while the posterior part and the molar teeth are 

 human. Thus the outstanding fact is the mixture of ape-like and 

 man-like characters. Perhaps it should be noted here that there are 

 as yet no certain remains of Anthropoid Apes in Britain. The 

 Piltdown lower jaw is certainly not that of a modern man; but it 



Fig. 195. 

 Reconstruction of the Head of Pithecanthropus (I) and of Neanderthal 



Man (II). After MacGregor. 



cannot be claimed that there is unanimity of interpretation, for 

 some still say that the jaw belonged to a chimpanzee, while Keith 

 on the other hand speaks of Eoanthropus as "the earliest Enghshman 

 we know of as yet". A palaeontographical Sherlock Holmes declares 

 that the remains of Eoanthropus are those of a woman, and that 

 she was drowned ! 



A great point is that the brain of Eoanthropus was equal to that 

 of modern man — a very remarkable fact, for there seems no doubt 

 as to simian features in teeth and mandible. Keith, as above cited, 

 regards the Piltdown skull as that not of a tentative man like 

 Pithecanthropus, but of a species of Homo, like the Neanderthal 

 man and the Rhodesian man. Sir A. Smith Woodward, who has been 

 equally zealous in the study of these ancient relics, regards the 

 Piltdown type as near the common ancestor from which the Nean- 

 derthal man and modern man have been derived. The data are still 

 too sparse to allow of precise pronouncement. 



