G. G. MacCurdy — Significance of the Piltdown Skull. 319 



may once have been a part of older deposits. The broken 

 edges of all the bones, human as well as animal, were worn before 

 finally coming to rest where they were found. The remains of 

 the Pliocene elephant and Mastodon are most worn, but the 

 difference in wear is not so marked as to exclude the possibil- 

 ity of all being coeval. All are as old as and may be older 

 than the Piltdown gravel beds. They date as far back as the 

 lower Quaternary and might even belong to the upper Plio- 

 cene. That rude implements of the eolithic type were associ- 

 ated with those human remains would seem to give to such 

 implements a standing hitherto denied them by some authori- 

 ties ; unless it can be proved that they were derived from a 

 deposit antedating that which originally contained the human 

 remains. Their pedigree was needed in order to make indus- 

 trial genealogy complete, just as the skull itself was needed to 

 fill a missing gap in man's physical evolution. When the two 

 sets of evidence are found intimately associated, they will serve 

 as a solid basis for further advances in the domain of prehis- 

 toric anthropology. It remains for the geologists to determine 

 whether in Piltdown the prehistorian's " Rosetta stone " has at 

 last been found. 



In the Smithsonian Report for 1909 (p. 581) I called atten- 

 tion to valley deposits as being the well-nigh inexhaustible 

 storehouse of archeology ; I was therefore prepared for such a 

 striking confirmation as Piltdown affords. The one great 

 drawback about valley deposit finds is that in the very nature 

 of the case they must ever be in a large measure fortuitous. 

 Cave deposits are so circumscribed that all one has to do is to 

 find his cave and set his men to work. An expert can even 

 afford to be on the spot almost continuously until the work is 

 completed. On the other hand, untutored workmen are con- 

 stantly digging in hundreds of sand, gravel, and clay pits over 

 wide areas. Continuous expert control is ont of the question 

 without an international subsidy on a large scale. The result 

 is that important data are overlooked and valuable specimens 

 are smashed by pick and shovel and irretrievably lost to view. 

 When by chance a find is made its authenticity is often open 

 to grave question. 



When the man of Sussex hunted in the valley of the Ouse 

 was there an English Channel ? The present Channel dates 

 from the very close of the paleolithic. Raised beaches near 

 Calais and on the south coast of England testify to the exist- 

 ence of an earlier channel, possibly during the Chellean epOch. 

 At any rate the man of Sussex must have had neighbors to the 

 south on what is now French soil. If there was no Channel 

 the Ouse and the Somme were tributaries of the same large 

 stream that flowed westward emptying into the Atlantic Ocean 



