(3) Eoanthropus Dawsoni: Dec. 18, 1912, is memorable with evolutionary anthropologists as the day on which Charles Dawson announced his discovery of the famous Dawn Man. The period of discovery extended from the years prior to 1911 up to Aug. 30, 1913, when the canine tooth was found by Father Teilhard de Chardin. The locality was Piltdown Common, Sussex, in England. The fragments recovered were an imperfect cranium, part of the mandible, and the above-mentioned canine tooth. The stratified Piltdown gravel, which Dawson assigns to the Lower Pleistocene or Glacial epoch, had been much disturbed by workmen, “who were digging the gravel for small repairs.” (Dawson.) The discoverer first found a fragment of a parietal bone. Then several years later, after the gravels had been considerably rainwashed, he recovered other fragments of the skull. All parts of the skeletal remains are said to have been found within a radius of several yards from the site of the initial discovery. The skull was reconstructed by Dr. A. Smith Woodward and deposited in the British Museum of Natural History at South Kensington. Eoliths were found in the same gravel as the skull.
Of the skull, according to Woodward, four parts remain, which, however, were integrated from nine fragments of bone. “The human remains,” he says, “comprise the greater part of a brain-case and one ramus of the mandible, with two lower molars.” Of Woodward’s reconstruction, Keith tells us that “an approach to symmetry and a correct adjustment of parts came only after many experimental reconstructions” (cf. “Antiquity of Man,” p. 364), and he also remarks that, when Woodward undertook to “replace the missing points of the jaws, the incisor and canine teeth, he followed simian rather than human lines.” (Op. cit., p. 324.) Here we may be permitted to observe that, even apart from the distorting influence of preconceived theories, this business of reconstruction is a rather dubious procedure. The absence of parts and the inevitable modification introduced by the use of cement employed to make the fragments cohere make accurate reconstruction an impossibility. The fact that Woodward assigned to the lower jaw a tooth which Gerrit Miller of the United States Museum assigns to the upper jaw, may well give pause to those credulous persons, who believe that palæontologists can reliably reconstruct a whole cranium or skeleton from the minutest fragments. Sometimes, apparently, the “experts” are at sea even over so simple a question as the proper allocation of a tooth.
Woodward, however, was fully satisfied with his own artistic work on Eoanthropus; for he says: “While the skull, indeed, is evidently human, only approaching a lower grade in certain characters of the brain, in the attachment for the neck, the extent of the temporal muscles and in the probable size of the face, the mandible appears to be almost precisely that of an ape, with nothing human except the molar teeth.” (Cf. Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1913, pp. 505, 506.) Of the cranial capacity Woodward gives the following estimate: “The capacity of the brain-case cannot, of course, be exactly determined; but measurements both by millet seed and water show that it must have been at least 1,070 cc., while a consideration of the missing parts suggests that it may have been a little more (note the parsimoniousness of this concession!). It therefore agrees closely with the capacity of the Gibraltar skull, as determined by Professor Keith, and equals that of the lowest skulls of the existing Australians. It is much below the Mousterian skulls from Spy and La Chapelle-aux-Saints.” (Loc. cit., p. 505.)
Where Doctor Woodward came to grief, however, was in his failure to discern the obvious disproportion between the mismated cranium and mandible. As a matter of fact, the mandible is older than the skull and belongs to a fossil ape, whereas the cranium is more recent and is conspicuously human. Woodward, however, was blissfully unconscious of this mésalliance. What there is of the lower jaw, he assures us, “shows the same mineralized condition as the skull” and “corresponds sufficiently well in size to be referred to the same individual without any hesitation.” (Loc. cit., p. 506.)
For this he was roundly taken to task by Prof. David Waterston in an address delivered by the latter before the London Geological Society, Dec., 1912. Nature, the English scientific weekly, reports this criticism as follows: “To refer the mandible and the cranium to the same individual would be equivalent to articulating a chimpanzee foot with the bones of a human thigh and leg.” Prof. J. H. McGregor of Columbia, though he followed Woodward in modeling the head of Eoanthropus now exhibited in “The Hall of the Age of Man,” told the writer that he believed the jaw and the skull to be misfits. Recently, Hrdlička has come out strongly for the separation of the mandible from the cranium, insisting that the former is older and on the order of the jaw of the fossil ape Dryopithecus, while the skull is less antique and indubitably human. The following abstract of Hrdlička’s view is given in Science, May 4, 1923: “Dr. Hrdlička,” we read, “holds that the Piltdown jaw is much older than the skull found near it and to which it had been supposed to belong.” (Cf. suppl. X.) Hrdlička asserts that, from the standpoint of dentition, there is a striking resemblance between the Piltdown jaw and that of the extinct ape Dryopithecus rhenanus. He comments, in fact, on “the close relation of the Piltdown molars to some of the Miocene or early Pliocene human-like teeth of this fossil ape.” (Ibidem.) Still other authorities, however, have claimed that the jaw was that of a chimpanzee.
To conclude, therefore, the Eoanthropus Dawsoni is an invention, and not a discovery, an artistic creation, not a specimen. Anyone can combine a simian mandible with a human cranium, and, if the discovery of a connecting link entails no more than this, then there is no reason why evidence of human evolution should not be turned out wholesale.
(4) The Neanderthal Man (No. 1): The remains of the famous Neanderthal Man were found in August, 1856, by two laborers at work in the Feldhofer Grotte, a small cave about 100 feet from the Düssel river, near Hochdal in Germany. This cave is located at the entrance of the Neanderthal gorge in Westphalia, at a height of 60 feet above the bottom of the valley. No competent scientist, however, saw the bones in situ. Both the bones and the loam, in which they were entombed, had been thrown out of the cave and partly precipitated into the ravine, long before the scientists arrived. Indeed, the scientific discoverer, Dr. C. Fuhlrott, did not come upon the scene until several weeks later. It was then too late to determine the age of the bones geologically and stratigraphically, and no petrigraphic examination of the loam was made. The cave, which is about 25 meters above the level of the river, communicates by crevices with the surface, so that it is possible that the bones and the loam, which covered the floor of the cave, may have been washed in from without. Fuhlrott recovered a skull-cap, two femurs, both humeri, both ulnæ (almost complete), the right radius, the left pelvic bone, a fragment of the right scapula, five pieces of rib, and the right clavicle. (Cf. Hugues Obermaier’s article, Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1906, pp. 394, 395.) “Whether they (the bones) were really in the Alluvial loam,” says Virchow, “no one saw.... The whole importance of the Neanderthal skull consists in the honor ascribed to it from the very beginning, of having rested in the Alluvial loam, which was formed at the time of the early mammals.” (Quoted by Ranke, “Der Mensch,” II, p. 485.) We know nothing, therefore, regarding the age of the fragmentary skeleton; for, as Obermaier says: “It is certain that its exact age is in no way defined, either geologically or stratigraphically.” (Loc. cit., p. 395.)
The remains are no less enigmatic from the anthropological standpoint. For while no doubt has been raised as to their human character, they have given rise to at least a dozen conflicting opinions. Thus Professor Clemont of Bonn pronounced the remains in question to be those of a Mongolian Cossack shot by snipers in 1814, and cast by his slayers into the Feldhofer Grotte. The same verdict had been given by L. Meyer in 1864. C. Carter Blake (1864) and Karl Vogt (1863) declared the skull to be that of an idiot. J. Barnard Davis (1864) claimed that it had been artificially deformed by early obliteration of the cranial sutures. Pruner-Bey (1863) said that it was the skull of an ancient Celt or German; R. Wagner (1864), that it belonged to an ancient Hollander; Rudolf Virchow, that the remains were those of a primitive Frieslander. Prof. G. Schwalbe of Strassburg erected it into a new genus of the Anthropidæ in 1901. In 1904, however, he repented of his rashness and contented himself with calling it a distinct human species, namely, Homo primigenius, in contradistinction to Homo sapiens (modern man). As we shall see presently, however, it is not a distinct species, but, at most, an ancient variety or subspecies (race) of the species Homo sapiens, differing from modern Europeans only in the degree that Polynesians, Mongolians, and Hottentots differ from them, that is, within the limits of the one and only human species. Other opinions might be cited (cf. Hrdlička, Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1913, p. 518, and H. Muckermann’s “Darwinism and Evolution,” 1906, pp. 63, 64), but the number and variety of the foregoing bear ample testimony to the uncertain and ambiguous character of the remains.
The skull is that of a low, perhaps, degenerate, type of humanity. The facial and basal parts of the skull are missing. Hence we are not sure of the prognathism shown in McGregor’s reconstruction. The skull has, however, a retreating forehead, prominent brow ridges and a sloping occiput. Yet, in spite of the fact that it is of a very low type, it is indubitably human. “In no sense,” says Huxley, “can the Neanderthal bones be regarded as the remains of a human being intermediate between men and apes.” (“Evidence of Man’s Place in Nature,” Humb. ed., p. 253.) D. Schaaffhausen makes the same confession—“In making this discovery,” he owns, “we have not found the missing link.” (“Der Neanderthaler Fund,” p. 49.) The cranial capacity of the Neanderthal skull, as we have seen, is 1,236 c.cm., which is practically the same as that of the average European woman of today. In size it exceeds, but in shape it resembles, the dolichocephalic skull of the modern Australian, being itself a dolichocephalic cranium. Huxley called attention to this resemblance, and Macnamara, after comparing it with a large number of such skulls, reaches this conclusion: “The average cranial capacity of these selected 36 skulls (namely, of Australian and Tasmanian blacks) is even less than that of the Neanderthal group, but in shape some of these two groups are closely related.” (Archiv. für Anthropologie, XXVIII, 1903, p. 358.) Schwalbe’s opinion that the Neanderthal Man constitutes a distinct species, though its author has since abandoned it (cf. Wasmann’s “Modern Biology,” Eng. ed., 1910, p. 506), will be considered later, viz. after we have discussed the Men of Spy, Krapina and Le Moustier, all of whom have been assigned to the Neanderthal group.
(5) Neanderthal Man (No. 2): This specimen is said to be more recent than No. 1. Its discoverers were Rautert, Klaatsch, and Koenen. It consists of a human skeleton without a skull. It was found buried in the loess at a depth of 50 centimeters. This loess had been washed into the ruined cave, where the relics were found, subsequently to its deposition on the plateau above. The bones were most probably washed into the cave along with the loess, which fills the remnant of the destroyed cave. The upper plateau of the region is covered with the same loess. The site of the second discovery was 200 meters to the west of the Neanderthal Cave (i.e. the Feldhofer Grotte). The bones were either washed into the broken cave, or buried there later. We have no indication whatever of their age.