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For the Early Pleistocene, apart from the Java fossil, Pithecanthropus erectus, a veritable 'missing link', whom we may here disregard as falling altogether outside our world of Europe, there are only two individuals that can with certainty be referred to this distant period. These are the Piltdown and the Heidelberg specimens.
Its large toes protruded laterally as do those of the semiarboreal peoples of Borneo, the Philippines and other remote regions where low types still persist. The countenance might have been that of a cross between Pithecanthropus, the Java ape-man, and a daughter of the Piltdown race of prehistoric Sussex. A wooden cudgel lay beside the corpse. Now this fact set me thinking.
It has nothing to do with its life. It is as helpful to us as wall-texts and those wonders we know as works of Pure Thought. Let us remember all the noble volumes of philosophy and metaphysics we ought to have read, to learn how wonderfully far our brains have taken us beyond the relic of Piltdown; and then recall what Ypres was like, and buy a teetotum instead. That much is saved.
Gruenberg's high school text book teaches that man is descended from the pithecanthropus, the Heidelberg, the Piltdown and the Neanderthal man, without the slightest intimation that such descent is at all disputed or questioned. What right has anyone to teach this false and unproved theory as the truth?
Look at the Piltdown skull: reconstruct the person or creature whose brain that skull contained, and actualize the directions in which his imperious instincts, his vaguely conscious will and desire, were pressing into life. They too were expressions of Creative Spirit; and there is perfect continuity between his vital impulse and our own.
Osborn puts the pithecanthropus, the Heidelberg man, the Piltdown man, and the Neanderthal man, on limbs which terminate abruptly as extinct races. They can, in no sense, then, be the ancestors of man, or connecting links. Why, then, do they cling so desperately to these alleged proofs, when they admit they have no evidential value?
A report to Congress, a debate, an investigation, legal briefs, a census, a tariff, a tax schedule; the material, like the skull of the Piltdown man, has to be put together by ingenious inference before the student obtains any sort of picture of the event he is studying.
Sir Ray Lancaster, writing to H. G. Wells, concerning the Piltdown find, says, "We are stumped and baffled."
Speaking generally, we may say that it marks a stage of progress as compared with the Piltdown type; though, if the jaw, heavy and relatively chinless as it is, has become less simian, the protruding brow-ridge lends a monstrous look to the face, while the forehead is markedly receding a feature which turns out, however, to be not incompatible with a weight of brain closely approaching our own average.
Charles Dawson, in reconstructing a man from the Piltdown skull, discovered in 1912 on Piltdown Common, near Ucksfield, Sussex, England, built up something essentially monkey-like, with receding forehead, projecting brows, and a gorilla-like lower jaw. Prof. Keith, a renowned specialist, checking up on this reconstruction, comes to an entirely different conclusion. He finds that the work of Drs.
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