HIS ANTIQUITY AND CHARACTERISTICS. 



25 



Pliocene, the Neanderthals and other races also became separated, 

 so that we find in the Pleistocene, men who, so far as the bony frame- 

 work of their bodies is concerned, are practically the same as modern 

 man. Mr. Dale speaks in his paper of the burial rites of these pre- 

 historic men, which show their belief in a future life. He speaks 

 also of their artistic productions, which are, of course, remarkable. 

 Dr. Astley contends that this artistic faculty could not have been 

 evolved in a generation, and that the ancestors of the Cro-Magnons, 

 going a good way back, must have been distinctly men. 



The Piltdown skull, of which Mr. Dale speaks in the latter part 

 of his paper, is very fully discussed by Dr. Keith, who says : " Pilt- 

 down man saw, heard, felt, thought, and dreamt much as we still do." 

 There is a great controversy going on between Mr. G. S. Miller, of 

 the United States National Museum, and Mr. Pycraft, of the Zoo- 

 logical Department of the British Museum, as to the jaw of the 

 Piltdown man, Mr. Miller declaring that the jaw does not belong to 

 the skull, but that it is the jaw of a chimpanzee. 



Mr. Dale speaks of these remains as being recognised by all authori- 

 ties as the oldest human remains. Professor Osborn, however, in 

 Men of the Old Stone Age, contests their geological age. He says : 

 " I have placed the Piltdown man in a comparatively recent stage 

 of geologic time ; an entirely opposite conclusion to that of Dr. 

 Smith Woodward." In several cases of these prehistoric skulls, the 

 geological age of the strata in which they were found is now questioned. 



One difficulty, now that the Missing Link theory has failed, is to 

 account for the disappearance of the so-called Neanderthal race, 

 leaving no descendants. As to the Heidelberg jawbone, Professor 

 Branca, in his Fossil Man, warns us of the impossibility of deciding 

 what a skull was like merely from a jawbone. As a fact, there are 

 many practical difficulties, I may say absurdities, besetting the 

 theory of the evolution even of the body of man from the animal, 

 leaving aside all reference to man's higher nature. 



In another book of Professor Keith's, The Human Body, written 

 before he found that the missing links must be given up, he uses as 

 arguments for the evolution of man from an ape-like ancestry, many 

 small organs in our bodies which have some resemblance to similar 

 organs in the bodies of the ape, 'such as certain muscles, the tip of 

 the outer ear, a lobe at the base of the right lung, the long and narrow 



