Annual report . A reindeer grazing, from the cavern of Kesslerloch near Thayugen,Switzerland, engraved on a shaft-straightener. A Magdalenian Sottas Courtesy American Museum of Natural History without sensibly changing its general aspect, and if we consider thatit carries us back to an epoch anterior to that in which the man ofthe Middle Pleistocene lived, we can see in it one of the primitivestages of the latter; or, otherwise speaking, we may suppose thatHomo heidelbergensis represents in the Lower Pleisto-cene the ancestral form of Homo neanderthalensis. The discovery at P
Annual report . A reindeer grazing, from the cavern of Kesslerloch near Thayugen,Switzerland, engraved on a shaft-straightener. A Magdalenian Sottas Courtesy American Museum of Natural History without sensibly changing its general aspect, and if we consider thatit carries us back to an epoch anterior to that in which the man ofthe Middle Pleistocene lived, we can see in it one of the primitivestages of the latter; or, otherwise speaking, we may suppose thatHomo heidelbergensis represents in the Lower Pleisto-cene the ancestral form of Homo neanderthalensis. The discovery at Piltdown is of more delicate interpretation andthis is because of the fragmentary condition of the remains. Thejaw is distinctly pithecoid, although the cranium appears much morerelated to that of recent man than to that of the Homo nean-derthalensis. At first sight one can not fail to be surprised. PQ o ou o REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I913 153 at the association in the same individual of simian and human char-acters so emphatically developed, and when one considers that thefirst are localized in the mandible, the second in the cranium, it isreasonable to question whether the sands of Piltdown may not havefurnished the bones of two different individuals, an anthropoid anda man. The improbability of this hypothesis, which has been sug-gested by savants of distinction, of course, a priori, can not beescaped. It is necessary, nevertheless, to remark that as yet noanthropoid has been discovered in the European Lower the duality of the Piltdown discovery is rejected, Eoan-thropus dawsoni would be one of the surprising syntheticforms of which paleontology has revealed to us the existence inother fossil groups. In any case, if the reconstructions submitted
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