HEIDELBERG MAN 233 
hundred and sixty miles distant from the mouth of 
the Rhine. On the side of the valley, where the great 
sand-pit has been dug, the land rises 85 feet above the 
bottom of the valley, but so extensively and so deeply 
has the pit been worked that its floor has almost 
reached the level of the bed of the present stream. 
The working face of the sand-pit has a total depth of 
25 m. (79I- feet). 
For a long time the Mauer pit has been closely studied 
by geologists on account of its clear representation of 
Pleistocene deposits, and because of the extinct fauna 
preserved in its deeper strata. No site in Europe, it 
was realised, was more likely to yield the bones of early 
Pleistocene man than the sand-pit at Mauer. No one 
was more fully alive to this possibility than Dr Otto 
Schoetensack, Lecturer on Geology in the University of 
Heidelberg. Half an hour's journey by rail took him 
to the pit almost daily. After waiting and searching for 
twenty years, the owner of the pit, Herr J. Rosch, was 
able to inform him on October 21st, 1907, that his twenty 
years' search had at last been realised. " Yesterday," 
he wrote, " the desired evidence was obtained, for 
20 m. below the surface soil, and above the floor of my 
sand-pit, there was found the lower jaw of primitive 
man, in good preservation, and with all its teeth." In the 
following year, 1908, Dr Schoetensack prepared and 
published a monograph on the lower jaw of Homo 
heidelbergensis which in exactness, directness, and fullness 
will always serve as an example for future discoverers 
of prehistoric remains.^ 
Before discussing the anatomical characters of the 
Heidelberg mandible, it is necessary to see what light 
may be obtained as to its antiquity. Concerning the 
authenticity of the find there cannot be any doubt ; the 
bed in which the mandible lay was covered by a series 
of deposits, amounting in all to 78 feet. In the deposits 
1 Der Unterkiefer dcs Homo heidelbergensis : Ein Beitrag zur 
Palaeojiiologie des Metischen, von Otto Schoetensack, Leipzig, 1908. I 
regret to add that Dr Schoetensack died in 1913. 
