218 Scientific Intelligence. 



The author of the book under review studies man not only along 

 these four lines, but in the light of his environment as well. 

 The history is a very long one, with a geologic vista through no 

 less than 520,000 years, and with a reverence for the dead, as 

 shown in burial, which takes us back fully 200,000 years. 



With regard to the marked but friendly controversy now going 

 on concerning the man of Piltdown, England, Osborn concludes 

 that this early form is not as old as the majority of authorities, say 

 he is. His reason for this belief is that the man is so far advanced, 

 in mentality as to exclude him from the earlier part of Pleisto- 

 cene time. Having taken this stand, he logically goes further 

 and states that, contrary to the prevailing opinion of " some of 

 the highest authorities," he believes the oldest stone implements 

 made by man do not go back moi-e than 125,000 years, or to the 

 time of the third interglacial stage. " Since the Piltdown man 

 was found in association with such implements, it is at once seen 

 that the two questions hang together" (ix). The eoliths, or 

 primitive flints, found in various parts of Europe from Oligocene 

 to Pleistocene times, he holds are now generally admitted to be 

 "mostly of accidental shapes, and there has been little or no 

 proof of their being fashioned by human hands" (85). 



Interest in human evolution centers chiefly in the skull and in 

 the brain, and the author, with the assistance of Professor J. H. 

 McGregor, presents restorations of the heads of the various races 

 of men of the Old Stone Age. The controlling principle was to 

 make them "as human as the anatomical evidence will admit," 

 and in this the restorations are eminently successful. " No 

 doubt," says Osborn, " our ancestors of the early Stone Age 

 were brutal in many respects, but the representations . . . of men 

 with strong gorilla or chimpanzee characteristics are, I believe, 

 unwarranted by the anatomical remains" (xii). 



" From the earliest Palaeolithic to Neolithic times it does not 

 appear that western Europe was ever a center of human evolution 

 in the sense that it gave rise to a single new species of man. The 

 main racial evolution and the earlier and later branches of the 

 human family were established in the east and successively found 

 their way westward; nor is there at present any ground for 

 believing that any very prolonged evolution or transformation of 

 human types occurred in western Europe" (489). 



Osborn holds that the Piltdown race " was not related at all 

 either to the Heidelbergs or to the Neanderthals, nor was it 

 directly ancestral to an}'- of the other races of the Old Stone Age, 

 or to any of the existing species of man. . . . The Piltdown 

 race represents a side branch of the human family which has left 

 no descendants at all" (144). 



" In the whole racial history of western Europe there has 

 never occurred so profound a change as that involving the disap- 

 pearance of the Neanderthal race and the appearance of the Cro- 

 Magnon race. It was the replacement of a race lower than any 

 existing human type by one which ranks high among the existing 



