A] DISCOVERIES ATTRIBUTED TO EARLY MAN 35 
interpretation of the phenomena involved, and until all room for 
serious doubt concerning the age of the finds shall have been removed. 
It is particularly regrettable that in the Vero case anthropologists 
could not have had the opportunity of examining the evidence on the 
spot while the human remains were still in situ, rather than after 
everything relating to human occupancy had been removed and afte-r 
far-reaching conclusions concerning the age of the remains had re 
ceived wide publicity. 
It is scarcely safe for the geologist or the paleontologist to assume 
that the problem of human antiquity is his problem. Although it is 
only just to acknowledge that geology and especially paleontology 
can be, on occasion, of the greatest aid to anthropology in determin 
ing the age of human remains, yet these branches are not adequate 
in themselves to deal with the subject. In all cases in which the 
remains of man are concerned, be they cultural or skeletal, there 
enters a most important factor into the case which does not exist for 
the geologist and paleontologist, namely, the human element, the 
element of man s conscious activities. 
Like inorganic materials, the remains of plants and animals are 
passive objects, affected only by the action of living plants and 
animals and that of the elements. In the main they find their rest 
ing places accidentally, and, unless they sink into the soil or are 
displaced by some agency subsequent to their deposition, they consti 
tute safe evidence of contemporaneity with other similar objects 
and with the geologic components of the same horizon. Not so, 
however, with the remains of man. Accidentally or intentionally 
he introduces cultural objects into the ground, and from the earliest 
known times has buried his dead at varying depths, thus introducing 
his remains into deposits and among other remains with which 
otherwise they had no relation. 
There have been accidental deaths in rivers and bogs, and in 
certain cases human bodies have remained on the surface of the 
ground unburied, but such instances have been always, as they are 
to-day, very rare. Still more rare must have been the abandonment 
of unburied bodies in numbers; this would happen only after a 
battle, a massacre, or a great pestilence. But what chance would 
human skeletons left in this way upon the surface have of becoming 
actually included, in any degree approximating entirety, natural re 
lations of the parts and a good state of preservation, in a slowly 
forming geological stratum, and so of becoming true paleontological 
specimens, synchronous with the bones of animals and other organic 
materials in the same -deposits ? The chance is too slight to deserve 
serious consideration. The bones, with the exception, perhaps, of 
those of some compact part, as a hand or a foot, would be broken, 
scattered, gnawed by animals, weathered, split, moss-eaten, root- 
