HRDLifKA] SKELETAL REMAINS OF EAELY MAN 345 



drain leading to a sump or well (later the rudder-pit), above wliich 

 is the pumping machinery. Plate 48 represents the finished dock 

 and shows the rudder-pit in the position where the well had been. 

 During the progress of the work the river deposits, which no doubt 

 contain remains of natives drowned in the Rio de la Plata, were com- 

 pletely exposed. 



The second possibihty is that the skulls, skull, or fragment came 

 to the spot where found years before the building of the dock 

 began. The character of the river bank was favorable to acci- 

 dental burial to a considerable depth. We were told by Dr. Fran- 

 cisco P. Moreno that he, when a boy, used to go swimming where 

 the dry dock now is, in deep pools, whose general character is indi- 

 cated in plate 56. The photograph represents the bank at Ancho- 

 rena, a suburb of Buenos Aires, but a few kilometers from the dry 

 dock, where the Pampean terrane is of the same nature. The river 

 has worked out deep irregular holes into which anything like the 

 skull-cap called Diprothomo would readily sink and where it would 

 become buried lower than the surface of the Pampean, but beneath 

 recent river mud. 



In view of the facts established by the photographs and of the 

 probabilities suggested by the character of the river bank, the writer 

 can not give weight to Mr. Junor's belief that the unknown workman 

 who found the skull and gave it to the foreman who in turn gave it 

 to Mr. Junor really dug it out of undisturbed ancient Pampean. 



Concluding Remarks on the Diprothomo 

 By AleS Hrdlicka 



The new publications on the subject referred to in preceding pages 

 are found to necessitate no change in the remarks and conclusions 

 already presented by the writer, Schwalbe has considered the spec- 

 imen from some additional standpoints, but the results are always 

 the same: they show the fragment to be simply human and much like 

 the corresponding part of a modern human skull. As to Ameghino's 

 additional papers, they only tend to make the case against his far- 

 fetched notions the stronger by accentuating the defects of these 

 notions. Accurate measurements and the relations of such meas- 

 urements have in anthropology, as elsewhere, a fixed, solid value, 

 which can not be lightly passed over. And as to the orienta- 

 tion of the fragment, if, as Ameghino objects, poking it like the 

 corresponding part in man makes it look human, where then is 

 the difference ? Could the same part of any extinct or fossil primate 

 or even that of the really ancient European man be made, no matter 

 how posed, in shape and size so much like that of the modern man 

 that it could not be readily distinguished by anthropologists of 



