Fig. 69. The Piltdown skull with the right half removed to display the extreme thickness of the bones and the shape of the brain. As restored by J. H. McGregor. One-quarter life size.
Fig. 70. Outline of the left side of the Piltdown brain, compared with similar brain outlines of a chimpanzee and of a high type of modern man. One-half life size.
At first sight the brain-case resembles that of the Neanderthal skull found at Gibraltar, which is supposed to be that of a woman; it is relatively long, narrow, and especially flat, but it is smaller and presents more primitive features than those of any known human brain. Taking all these features into consideration, we must regard this as being the most primitive and most ape-like human brain so far recorded; one such as might reasonably be associated with a jaw which presented such distinctive ape characters. The brain, however, is far more human than the jaw, from which we may infer that the evolution of the brain preceded that of the mandible, as well as the development of beauty of the face and the human development of the bodily characters in general.
The latest opinion of Smith Woodward[AA] is that the brain, while the most primitive which has been discovered, had a bulk of nearly 1300 c.cm., equalling that of the smaller human brains of to-day and surpassing that of the Australians, which rarely exceeds 1250 c.cm.
The original views of Smith Woodward and of Elliot Smith regarding the relation of the Piltdown race to the Heidelberg and Neanderthal races are also of very great interest and may be cited. First, the fact that the Piltdown and Heidelberg races are almost of the same geologic age proves that at the end of the Pliocene Epoch the representatives of man in western Europe had already branched into widely divergent groups: the one (Heidelberg-Neanderthal) characterized by a very low projecting forehead, with a subhuman head of Neanderthaloid contour; the other with a flattened forehead and with an ape-like jaw of the Piltdown contour. We should not forget that in the Piltdown skull the absence of prominent ridges above the eyes may possibly be due in some degree to the fact that the type skull may belong to a female, as suggested by certain characters of the jaw; but among all existing apes the skull in early life has the rounded shape of the Piltdown skull, with a high forehead and scarcely any brow ridges. It seems reasonable, therefore, to interpret the Piltdown skull as exhibiting a closer resemblance to the skulls of our human ancestors in mid-Tertiary times than any fossil skull hitherto found. If this view be accepted, we may suppose that the Piltdown type became gradually modified into the Neanderthal type by a series of changes similar to those passed through by the early apes as they evolved into typical modern apes, with their low brows and prominent ridges above the eyes. This would tend to support the theory that the Neanderthal men were degenerate offshoots of the Tertiary race, of which the Piltdown skull provides the first discovered evidence—a race with a simple, flattened forehead and developed eye ridges.
Fig. 71. Restoration of the head of Piltdown man, in profile, based upon the reconstruction shown in Fig. 68, p. 137. After model by J. H. McGregor. One-quarter life size.
Elliot Smith concluded that members of the Piltdown race might well have been the direct ancestors of the existing species of man (Homo sapiens), thus affording a direct link with undiscovered Tertiary apes; whereas, the more recent fossil men of the Neanderthal type, with prominent brow ridges resembling those of the existing apes, may have belonged to a degenerate race which later became extinct. According to this view, Eoanthropus represents a persistent and very slightly modified descendant of the type of Tertiary man which was the common ancestor of a branch giving rise to Homo sapiens, on the one hand, and of another branch giving rise to Homo neanderthalensis, on the other.
