318 G. G. Mac Curdy — Significance of the Piitdown Skull. 



the other hand, this does not by any means let down the bars 

 to indiscriminate claims for the artifact nature of all primitive 

 looking flints. If a great majority of all the so-called eoliths 

 or pre-Chellean types were thrown away, there would still be 

 left enough to do business with as the case of Piitdown proves. 



Personally I have for years been a believer in the prehistoric 

 possibilities of southern England because of the outcrops of 

 flint-bearing Chalk stretching from Dorset and Sussex on the 

 south to Caddington and the Cromer Forest Beds on the 

 north.* Of all raw materials flint is perhaps the best suited to 

 tempt nascent Homo to become a tool-user. It is the most 

 utilizable of all stones because of its hardness and mode of 

 fracture, leaving a sharp straight edge. Flint flakes can be 

 produced by purely natural means. The accidental stepping 

 on one of these would suffice, after repetition at least, to prove 

 their efficiency. Thus the oldest and most primitive imple- 

 ments that have come down to us are utilized flint chips. 

 Once the flint-using habit was formed it spread ; and when the 

 natural supply became scarce it was supplemented by arti- 

 ficially produced chips. The chief sources of flint are the chalk 

 deposits of Cretaceous age that occur so plentifully in western 

 Europe — as seen for example in the white cliffs along the 

 southern coast of England. Approaching one of these cliffs, 

 you will find it studded with parallel beds of flint nodules. 

 Wherever flint occurs stone-age relics are apt to be abundant. 



It is not generally known to Channel voyagers that the white 

 cliffs at Peachy Head and again more than 50 miles farther east 

 at Dover are the bases of a great anticlinal fold whose axis 

 passes from Dungeness in a westerly direction through Hamp- 

 shire. The crest of the fold which once towered high over 

 what is now the Weald disappeared ages ago, leaving two 

 slender tongues from the great Chalk plain of Dorset, Wilt- 

 shire, and Hampshire, the tip of one (the North Downs) being 

 at Dover, and that of the other (the South Downs) at Beachy 

 Head. The scene of Dawson's epoch-making discovery is 

 almost due north of Beachy Head just beyond the South 

 Downs plateau and hence near the southern limits of the Weald. 

 The Ouse takes its rise in the Weald, flows southward, cutting 

 through the South Downs and emptying into the Channel at 

 New Haven. 



The Piitdown gravels are 80 feet higher than, and nearly a 

 mile north, of the present stream-bed of the Ouse. This sig- 

 nifies a great age for the deposit. While it may not be so old 

 as the patches of red clay with rude flints on the Downs north 

 of Ightharn as well as on the South Downs at Beachy Head 

 and Eastbourne, some at least of the materials composing it 

 * Amer. Anthropologist, vol. vii, 442, 1905. 



