422 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION C. 



human origin, but further that they are of the same age as the strata in which 

 thiBy occur, without the possibility of their having been introduced at a later 

 time. In this communication I propose to apply these tests to the evidence. 



The Pliocene age of man in East Angiia is founded entirely on the roughly 

 chipped flints in the basal Pliocene strata — on eoliths, mainly of the rostro- 

 carinate or eagle's-beak type of Moir and Lankester. It has been amply proved, 

 in this country by Warren, Haward, and Sollas, and in France by Boule, Breuil, 

 and Cartailhac, that these can be made without the intervention of man 

 by the pressure and movement of the surface deposits, by the action of ice, 

 by the torrents and rivers, and by the dash of the waves on the shore. The 

 type specimens taken to be of human work have been selected out of a large 

 eeriee of broken flints that graduate into forms obviously made by natural 

 fractures. They are, as iJoule aptly says, ' hypersele^tionnees,' and can only 

 be rightly interpreted by their relation to the other flints on the Pliocene 

 shore-line. 



As might be expected, if they are due to natural causes, the ' rostro- 

 carinates ' are widely distributed through the basal beds of the crag in 

 Norfolk and Suffolk. They occur also in the Upper Miocenes of Puy-Courny 

 (Auvergne), in the Pleistocene gravels of London, and the present shore-line 

 of Selsey, where they are now probably being made by the breakers. For 

 these reasons I agree with M. Boule that they have not been proved to have 

 been made by man, and that therefore they throw no light on his i)lace in 

 the geological record. 



The presence of man in East Angiia during the Glacial period is founded 

 on even worse evidence than this. The Ipswich skeleton on which Moir and 

 Keith base their epeculations was obtained from a shallovv' pit sunk through 

 the surface soil of decalcified boulder clay — not of boulder clay in situ, as 

 stated — into the Glacial sand that crops out on the valley slope. It is, in 

 my opinion, a case of interment that may be of any age from the neolithic to 

 modern times. The skeleton also is of modern type, and belongs, as Duckworth 

 shows, to the graveyard series of burials. 



We come now to the consideration of the evidence of the famous discovery 

 on Piltdown of Eo-anthro-pus Dawsoni — the missing link between primitive 

 man and the higher apes. After the examination of the whole group of 

 remains, and a study of the section, I fully accept Dr. Smith Woodward's 

 opinion that the find belongs to the early Pleistocene period. The associated 

 implements are of the same Chellean or Acheulean type as those so abundant 

 in the mid-Pleistocene Brick-earths of the Thames Valley between Crayford 

 and Gravesend. They may imply that Eo-anthropvs belongs to that horizon, 

 in which the stag is present and the reindeer absent. It must not, however, 

 be forgotten that the classificatory value of these implements is lessened by 

 their wide range in Britain and the Continent through the later Pleistocene 

 river deposits. The stag, the beaver, and the horse of Piltdown — leaving 

 out of account the Pliocene fossil mammals more or less worn into pebbles — are 

 common both to the i^re-Glacial Forest-bed and the Lower Brick-earths of the 

 Thames Valley. It must also be noted that the intermediate characters of 

 the Piltdown ekull and lower jaw point rather to the Pliocene than the 

 Pleistocene stage of evolution. We must, in my oi^inion, wait for further 

 evidence before the exact horizon can be ascertained. On the Continent there 

 is no such difliculty. 



The earliest traces of man are there represented at Mauer by a mandible 

 associated with the peculiar fauna of the Forest-bed, showing that Homo 

 Heidelbcrgcnsis, a chinless man, was living in the Rhine Valley during the 

 earliest stage of the Pleistocene. The Neanderthal man, thick skulled and 

 large-brained, with small chin and stooping gait, belongs to the Mousterian 

 stage, that, in my opinion, is not clearly defined from the Chellean and 

 Acheulian gravels of the Late Pleistocene. He ranged from the Rhine through 

 France southwards as far as Gibraltar, and was probably the maker of the 

 Palaeolithic implements of those strata throughout this region. It is also 

 probable that he visited Britain, then part of the Continent, in following the 

 migration of the mammalia northward and westwards. While primitive men 

 of these types inhabited Euroj)© there was no place in the Pleistocene fauna 



