36 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BULL. 66 
eaten, and in nearly all cases wholly or largely destroyed. The same 
thing happens constantly with the skeletons of the larger animals 
whose bodies remain on the surface of the ground. What is pre 
served of them in the geological formations consists usually of indi 
vidual teeth or bones, or at most of a few related parts, yet animal 
bones are on the whole more durable than human bones, and there 
are immeasurably more of them. For every human body abandoned 
on the surface of the earth there were probably millions of carcasses 
of animals; and this applies even more forcibly to prehistoric times, 
when men were scarce and animals much more numerous. 
What slight chance, then, can there be of finding in any stratum, 
but especially in one of slow accumulation, a fairly complete and 
well-preserved human skeleton of equal age with the deposit ? And if 
one such marvel should happen, what chance would there be of the 
discovery within a few rods distance, at almost the same depth, and 
in a distinct geological formation, of a like skeleton? Surely such 
a chance would be infinitesimal; and if such skeleton or skeletons 
are actually found in ancient strata, it is only reasonable to expect 
that scientific explorers should make every possible effort to find 
a more probable explanation of their presence than that of original 
deposition, before announcing their contemporaneity with the in 
closing deposits and with the animal bones found in those deposits. 
But there are other considerations in cases of this nature which 
must receive due attention, and these are all anthropological. 
In the first place, anthropology has a right to expect that human 
remains of whatsoever nature assigned to great antiquity should show 
some adjustment in structural type to such antiquity. It is not suffi 
cient in any such case to endeavor to explain the presence of modern 
forms by the unsupported statement that such might have occurred 
in an earlier age. So much has already been accomplished in un 
raveling man s history, and so much material evidence, cultural and 
skeletal, has been gathered relating to this history, that the anthro 
pologist is well justified in demanding actual, generally acceptable 
precedents for such assumed occurrences. Thus pottery is not known 
to have existed in any part of the w r orld before the neolithic age, while 
strictly modern forms of the skull and bones, beginning with the 
upper Aurignacean or the Solutrian cultural periods, are not much 
older. Suppose, now, a modern type of pottery and modern forms of 
skeletal remains were found together what probability would there 
be of the finds being so ancient as to date from another geo 
logical epoch? And if, further, the remains were accompanied by 
modern forms of bone and stone implements, and if all the objects, 
skeletal and cultural, resembled to the point of practical identity 
those of the modern natives of the neighborhood or general region- 
would not the anthropologist be fully justified in demanding over- 
