13. The Piltdown Form
This form is reconstructed from several fragments of a female brain case, some small portions of the face, nearly half the lower jaw, and a number of teeth, found in 1911-13 by Dawson and Woodward in a gravel layer at Piltdown in Sussex, England. Great importance has been ascribed to this skull, but too many of its features remain uncertain to render it safe to build large conclusions upon the discovery. The age cannot be fixed with positiveness; the deposit is only a few feet below the surface, and in the open; the associated fossils have been washed or rolled into the layer; some of them are certainly much older than the skull, belonging to animals characteristic of the Pliocene, that is, the Tertiary. If the age of the skull was the third interglacial period, as on the whole seems most likely, its antiquity might be less than a fourth that of Pithecanthropus and half that of Heidelberg man.
The skull capacity has been variously estimated at 1,170, nearly 1,300, and nearly 1,500 c.c.; the pieces do not join, so that no certain proof can be given for any figure. Except for unusual thickness of the bone, the skull is not particularly primitive. The jaw and the teeth, on the other hand, are scarcely distinguishable from those of a chimpanzee. They are certainly far less human than the Heidelberg jaw and teeth, which are presumably earlier. This human skull and simian jaw are an almost incompatible combination. More than one expert has got over the difficulty by assuming that the skull of a contemporary human being and the jaw of a chimpanzee happened to be deposited in the same gravel.
In view of these doubts and discrepancies, the claim that the Piltdown form belongs to a genus Eoanthropus distinct from that of man is to be viewed with reserve. This interpretation would make the Piltdown type more primitive than the probably antecedent Heidelberg man. Some authorities do regard it as both more primitive and earlier.