The most ancient skeletal remains of man / by A. Hrdlička.

  • Alex Hrdlicka
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The most ancient skeletal remains of man / by A. Hrdlička. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    afterwards I visited the place, where two laborers were at work digging the gravel for small repairs to the roads. As this excavation was situated about four miles north of the limit where the occurrence of flints overlying the Wealden strata is recorded I was much interested and made a close examina- tion of the bed. I asked the workmen if they had found bones or other fossils there. As they did not appear to have noticed anything of the sort I urged them to preserve anything that they might find. Upon one of my subsequent visits to the pit, one of the men handed to me a small i>ortion of an unusually thick human parietal bone. I immediately made a search, but could find noth- ing more nor had the men noticed anything else. The bed is full of tabular pieces of ironstone closely resembling this piece of skull in color and thickness; and, although I made many subsequent searches, I could not hear of any fur- ther find nor discover anything—in fact, the bed seemed to be quite unfossiliferous. It was not until some years later, in the autumn of 1911, on a visit to the spot, that I picked up, among the rain-washed spoil heaps of the gravel pit, another and larger piece belonging to the frontal region of the same skull, in- cluding a portion of the left superciliary ridge * ♦ *. I took the bones to Dr. A. Smith Woodward at the British Museum (Natural History) for comparison and determination. He was immediately impressed with the importance of the discovery, and we decided to employ labor, and to make a systematic search among the spoil heaps and gravel as soon as the floods had abated, for the gravel pit is more or less under water during five or six months of the year. We accordingly gave up as much time as we could spare since last spring (1912) and completely turned over and sifted what spoil material remained; we also dug up and sifted such portions of the gravel as had been left undisturbed by the workmen ♦ * At Piltdown the gravel bed occurs beneath a few inches of the surface soil and varies in thickness from 3 to 5 feet • * *. Portions of the bed are rather finely stratified, and the materials are usually cemented together by iron oxide, so that a pick is often needed to dislodge portions—^more especially at one particular horizon near the base. It is in this last mentioned stratum that all the fossil bones and teeth discovered in situ by us have occurred. The stratum is easily distinguished in the appended photograph (pi. 5) by being of the darkest shade and just above the bedrock. The gravel is situated on a well-defined plateau of large area ♦ * ♦ and lies about 80 feet above the level of the main stream of the Ouse. Since the deposition of the gravel the river has cut through the plateau, both with its main stream and its principal branch, to tliis extent. Considering the amount of material excavated and sifted by us, the speci- mens discovered were numerically small and localized. Apparently the whole or greater portion of the human skull had been shat- tered by the workmen, who had thrown away the pieces unnoticed. Of these we recovered from the spoil heaps as many fragments as possible. In a somewhat deeper depression of the undisturbed gravel I found the right half of a human mandible. So far as I could judge, guiding myself by the position of a tree 3 or 4 yards away, the spot was identical with that upon which the men were at work when the first portion of the cranium was found several years ago. Dr. Woodward also dug up a small portion of the occipital bone of the skull from within a yard of the point where the jaw was discovered and at precisely the same level. The jaw appeared to have been broken at the symphysis and abraded, perhaps when it lay fixed in the gravel and before
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