CASTENEDOLO— MODERN MAN 251 
Ipswich. If the skeleton discovered there had been of a 
type totally different to that of modern man its antiquity 
as a " preboulder-clay " man would not have been 
questioned. But being of the modern type, and lying 
beneath only a shallow stratum, it can never be cited as 
certain evidence that modern man was in East Anglia in 
the opening third of the Pleistocene period. To me its 
value is merely potential. All the facts pertaining to it 
should be placed on record, but it can never be used as 
the basis from which to make another step into the past. 
Beyond Heidelberg our record ceases in Europe with 
two exceptions — the discovery at Piltdown and the one 
discussed in this chapter, Castenedolo. One cannot say 
that the existence of man of the modern type in the 
Pliocene period is outside the range of possibilities. Sergi 
can cite the evolution of the wolf, the bear, the gibbon, 
and another anthropoid ape — Dryopithecus — as having 
been already evolved early in Pliocene times, not the 
same species which now lives, but from an anatomist's 
point of view quite as highly evolved as the living species. 
What is possible in the evolution of apes may also be 
granted as a possibility in the case of man. But when I 
grant the possibility of men of the modern type having 
been in existence during the Pliocene period, I do not 
think the discoveries at Castenedolo prove it. The 
deepest of the bones lay only 6| feet below the surface 
of the land. Quatrefages mentions the fact that the 
bones were not fossilised to the degree noted in animal 
bones from the same deposit. A skeleton in a contracted 
posture must be regarded — unless proof to the opposite 
can be produced — as a burial, not necessarily from the 
present land surface, but from a land surface. To me 
the discovery at Castenedolo is simply a possibility ; it 
does not provide us with any sure foothold in our search 
into the antiquity of man. So far as modern man in 
Europe is concerned, we lose all trace of him at Galley 
Hill. We see the last of Neanderthal man in the 
sand-pit at Maucr. 
