THE JAW OF THE PILTDOWN MAN 



By GERRIT S. MILLER, Jr. 



(With Five Plates) 



About three years ago Mr. Charles Dawson found the right half 

 of an ape-like jaw in undisturbed material five feet below the level 

 of the surrounding country in a gravel pit at Piltdown, Sussex, 

 England. It lay in a depression at the bottom of the third and lowest 

 stratum of the deposit, a band eighteen inches thick consisting of 

 " dark brown ferruginous gravel, with subangular flints and tabular 

 ironstone, pliocene rolled fossils . . . . ' eoliths,' and one worked flint " 

 (Dawson and Woodward, 1914, p. 83). This third layer is supposed 

 to be " in the main composed of pliocene drift, probably reconstructed 

 in the pleistocene epoch" (Dawson and Woodward, 1914? P- 85). 

 Within a yard of the same spot, and at precisely the same level, Dr. 

 A. Smith Woodward later dug out a small piece of a human occipital 

 bone. From this pit, and presumably from about the same part of 

 it, other fragments were secured. They represent about half of a 

 human braincase, a pair of human nasal bones, and a simian canine 

 tooth ; also teeth of beaver, horse, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and two 

 kinds of elephant. The human and simian remains were regarded 

 by their discoverers as parts of one individual. On the basis of this 

 assumption, though before the canine tooth and the nasal bones had 

 been found, Dr. Woodward established a genus Eoanthropus, char- 

 acterized by the combination in one skull of a human braincase and 

 a completely ape-like jaw (Dawson and Woodward, April 25, 1913, 



P- J 35)- 



Few recently discovered fossils have excited more interest than the 

 " Dawn Man of Piltdown," and few have given rise to more discus- 

 sion (see bibliography at end of this paper) . Deliberate malice could 

 hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition in so 

 breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgment in 

 fitting the parts together. As a result no less than three restorations 

 of the braincase already exist (see Gregory, 1914, fig. 9), while the 

 canine tooth has been assigned to the right lower mandible and the 

 left upper jaw. The estimates on the capacity of the braincase range 

 from 1,070 to 1,500 cubic centimeters. While there is no doubt that 

 Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 65, No. 12 



