ni;DLM-KAl DISCOVERIES ATTRIBUTED TO EARLY MAN 35 



interpretation of the phenomena involved, and until all room for 

 serious doubt concerning the age of the finds shall have been removed. 

 It is particularly regrettable that in the Vero case anthropologists 

 could not liave had the opportunity of examining the evidence on the 

 spot while the human remains were still in situ, rather than after 

 ever3'thing relating to human occupancy had been removed and after 

 far-reaching conclusions concerning the age of the remains had re- 

 ceived wide publicity. 



It is scarcely safe for the geologist or the paleontologist to assume 

 that the problem of human antiquity is his problem. Although it is 

 only just to acknowledge that geology and especially paleontology 

 can be, on occasion, of the greatest aid to anthropology in determin- 

 ing the age of human remains, yet these branches are not adequate 

 in themselves to deal with the subject. In all cases in which the 

 remains of man are concerned, be they cultural or skeletal, there 

 enters a most important factor into the case which does not exist for 

 the geologist and paleontologist, namely, the human element^ the 

 element of man's conscious activities. 



Like inorganic materials, the remains of plants and animals are 

 passive objects, affected only by the action of living plants and 

 animals and that of the elements. In the main they find their rest- 

 ing places accidentally, and, unless they sink into the soil or are 

 displaced by some agency subsequent to their deposition, they consti- 

 tute safe evidence of contemporaneity with other similar objects 

 and with the geologic components of the same horizon. Not so, 

 howcA-er, with the remains of man. Accidentally or intentionally 

 he introduces cultural objects into the ground, and from the earliest 

 known times has buried his dead at varying depths, thus introducing 

 his remains into deposits and among other remains with which 

 otherwise they had no relation. 



There have been accidental deaths in rivers and bogs, and in 

 certain cases human bodies have remained on the surface of the 

 ground unburied, but such instances have been always, as they are 

 to-day, very rare. Still more rare must have been the abandonment 

 of unburied bodies in numbers; this would happen only after a 

 battle, a massacre, or a great pestilence. But what chance Avould 

 human skeletons left in this Avay upon the surface have of becoming 

 actually included, in any degree ai^proximating entirety, natural re- 

 lations of the parts and a good state of preservation, in a slowly 

 forndng geological stratum, and so of becoming true paleontoiogical 

 specimens, sjmchronous with the bones of animals and other organic 

 materials in the same deposits? The chance is too slight to deserve 

 serious consideration. The bones, with the exception, perhaps, of 

 those of some compact part, as a hand or a foot, would be broken, 

 scattered, gnawed b}' animals, Aveathered, split, moss-eaten, root- 



