DISCOVERY OF THE PILTDOWN SKULL 303 
Meantime, however, we are supposed to be standing 
by the pit, almost at the front door of a picturesque 
farm-house in Sussex. The present stream of the 
district — the Ouse — is nearly a mile distant, and 80 feet 
below the plateau on which the farm-house is placed. 
When the gravel of the pit was deposited, however, the 
Ouse flowed over the ground on which we stand — 
shifting its bed from time to time, now laying down 
a new stratum of gravel, and many a year later coming 
back to plough it up again and mix deposits together 
of very different ages. It is clear that the face of 
the country must have greatly changed since the Piltdown 
gravels were laid down. 
As we leave the pit there are several thoughts 
which must occur to everyone. How many of those 
ancient ancestors of ours have already been dug up 
and used as metal to mend our roads ? Had it not 
been for Mr Dawson, Piltdown man, his flints, and the 
remains of ancient elephants, hippopotamus, and beaver 
would have long ere now been ground to dust under 
the wheels of lumbering farm waggons. Another 
surprise is that so shallow a deposit, lying almost on 
the surface of the open land, can yield evidence of so 
ancient a phase of the earth's history and of the men 
of England. Had it chanced, however, that the human 
remains thus recovered had been of a type similar to the 
men still living in the world, what would have been 
the result ? Judging from what has happened in other 
cases, the universal verdict would have been that some 
mistake had been made, so strong is the belief that 
modern man is of modern origin. The condition of 
fossilisation of the human bones would then have had little 
influence on the verdict, for the rate at which bones 
become fossilised, when they become impregnated with 
iron, is extremely rapid. By good fortune, the human 
remains, as we shall see later, carry most certain 
indications of great antiquity in their peculiar features. 
The ancient human remains at Galley Hill, at Ipswich, 
at Castenedolo, and probably also at Olmo, were appar- 
