256 



SCIENCE 



[Vol. LVI, No. 1444 



SPECIAL ARTICLES 

 RECENT DISCOVERIES OF THE A>4TIQUITY 



OF MAN 



This paper is an aTjstraet of two lines of 

 research recently undertaken by the authors 

 which will be published under the titles: "Old 

 and New Standards of Pleistocene Division in 

 Relation to the Prehistory of Man in 

 Europe/" "Pliocene (Tertiary) and Early 

 Pleistocene (Quaternary) Mammalia of East 

 Anglia, Great Britain, in Relation to the Ap- 

 pearance of Man."- 



At the April, 1921, meeting of the National 

 Academy, Dr. Osborn ventured the prediction 

 that a large-brained type of man would be 

 found in the Pliocene. He was not aware that 

 such a discovery had actually been made in 

 the Upper Pliocene Red Crag deposits near 

 Ipswich, in the summer of 1921, because Mr. 

 Moir's discovery of Red Crag and of sub- 

 Red Crag man had not been accepted in Eng- 

 land. It was not until an unmistakable human 

 industrial level was found at Foxhall, near 

 Ipswich, in the summer of 1921, that this 

 locality was visited by the French archeologist, 

 Breuil, who announced this important dis- 

 covery at the Areheologieal Congress at 

 Liege, in August, 1921. Dr. Osborn immedi- 

 ately planned to visit this locality and to make 

 a careful survey and review of the animal life 

 which surrounded Foxhall man. This review, 

 fully set forth in both papers above 

 named, shows that Foxhall man— -capable of 

 making ten or twelve different kinds of flint 

 implements, of providing himself with cloth- 

 ing and of building a fire — sets an unmistaka- 

 ble Upper Pliocene date for the antiquity of 

 man, in which he was surrounded by relatively 

 primitive mastodons, rhinoceroses, saber-tooth 

 tigers and two species of elephants, a fauna 

 closely similar to the Upper Pliocene fauna of 

 the valley of the Arno River, near Florence, 

 Italy. 



More recent than the Foxhall industry is 



1 This paper, presented in abstract by Dr. 

 Reeds before the .Geological Society of America, 

 is now in press in the Proceedings of the society. 



- This paper by Dr. Osborn will appear in full 

 in the Geological Magazine, London, 1922. 



that of Cromer on the coast of Norfolk, dis- 

 covered during the summer of 1921. Cromer 

 is also treated as of Upper Pliocene age by 

 British archeologists, but it is unmistakably 

 Lower Pleistocene; it belongs to First Iiiter- 

 glacial time. 



To establish this second point, Dr. Os- 

 born enlisted the cooperation of Dr. Chester A. 

 Reeds, beginning in the month of September, 

 1921, and undertook an exhaustive examina- 

 tion of the old and new standards of Pleisto- 

 cene division in Europe, namely, of Geikie, 

 Penek, Briickner and Leverett, ending with the 

 recent work of Deperet and of De Geer. While 

 these authorities do not agree as to causes or 

 as to the duration of the Ice Age, a most 

 important result of concurrent observation in 

 England, France, Germany, Switzerland and 

 North America is that there were certainly 

 within the Ice Age four, and possibly five, dis- 

 tinct periods of glaeiation, with at least four 

 interglacial periods, all embraced within the 

 Quaternary. British geologists and at least 

 one French geologist, Mareellin Boule, include 

 the First Glaeiation within Tertiary time, but 

 all the other authorities named above regard 

 the First Glaeiation as the opening of Quater- 

 nary time. The latter view is the one adopted 

 by Osborn and Reeds and is clearly set forth 

 in the synthetic diagram which simimarizes our 

 present knowledge of the geologic succession, 

 of the industrial phases, and of the geologic 

 appearance of human types. This table will 

 be submitted to the coming International Con- 

 gress of Geology at Brussels. 



As a result of the researches summarized by 

 the authors, we are now able to fix with con- 

 siderable certainty the geologic level of the en- 

 tire succession of human industries, namely, 

 the Foxhallian, Cromerian, Chellean, Acheu- 

 lean, Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, 

 Magdalenian and Campignian. We are also 

 able to fix with considerable exactitude the 

 geologic age of the successive races of men, 

 i. e., Trinil, Piltdown, Heidelberg, Neanderthal 

 and Cro-Magnon, which appear between Fox- 

 hallian and Magdalenian industrial times. 



Henry Fairfield Osborn 

 Chester A. Reeds 

 ■ Amebican Museum of Natural Histoky 



