REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I913 



153 



at the association in the same individual of simian and human char- 

 acters so emphatically developed, and when one considers that the 

 first are localized in the mandible, the second in the cranium, it is 

 reasonable to question whether the sands of Piltdown may not have 

 furnished the bones of two different individuals, an anthropoid and 

 a man. The improbability of this hypothesis, which has been sug- 

 gested by savants of distinction, of course, a priori, can not be 

 escaped. It is necessary, nevertheless, to remark that as yet no 

 anthropoid has been discovered in the European Lower Pleistocene. 

 If the duality of the Piltdown discovery is rejected, Eoan- 

 thropus dawsoni would be one of the surprising synthetic 

 forms of which paleontology has revealed to us the existence in 

 other fossil groups. In any case, if the reconstructions submitted 



Engraving on horn, partly restored, from the cavern of Lorthet, regarded 

 as one of the finest examples of Magdalenian art. 

 After Ray Lankester Courtesy American Museum of Natural History 



by the English anthropologists are exact, this being can not in any 

 wise, on the basis of its cranial characters, take its place in the 

 phylum of Homo neanderthalensis, and it will be 

 logical to suppose that it represents the ancestral form from which 

 Homo sapiens has been derived by an evolution whose stages 

 have escaped us in the course of the Middle Pleistocene. We 

 should have thus found at the opening of Quaternary time, the 

 duality of types which we have vainly searched for in the Middle 

 Quaternary. Their discovery would be here of great interest. 

 Nevertheless, it is necessary to await other evidence before drawing 

 any conclusions regarding this. 



The absence of all remains of Homo sapiens in the Middle 

 Quaternary can be explained in a quite simple manner. A certain 



