THE PILTDOWN SKULL.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXVII, Issue 17281, 23 September 1916, Page 12

THE PILTDOWN SKULL.

Mr Charles Dawson, tne discoverer of the Piltdown skull, a solicitor, and foi twenty-two years clerk to the TJckfield Bench of Magistrates, died at Lewes on August 11, at the age of fifty-two years. Seldom has any discovery aroused Buch interest in the world of science as that by Mr Dawson of the Piltdown skull, which linked modern man very closely in some respects with the anthropoid apes, marking, as it did, the most notable advance ever made in England in our knowledge of the ancestry of man. Walking along the road from Lewes into the Weald, Mr Dawson noticed that it had been recently mended by peculiar flints which he traced to a pit near Piltdown Common. On examining the pit he found that labourers had dug out a "thing like a cocoanut," and thrown the pieces on a rubbish heap. From that rubbish heap the greater part of a human sknll was recovered, and the lower part subsequently dug from the undisturbed gravel. It is generally believed to be the skull of a woman, and the geological evidence of the strata in which, it was found shows that she lived at least as long ago as when the bed of the North Sea and the English Channel were dry land. The skull was the oldest ever found, and belonged to the lowest typ* of human being. The woman could not speak more than a chimpanzee, which she probably resembled, though certain features in the brain which characterise the human race were just beginning to show. She probably belonged to a raw of wandering who had no domestic animals, who were without knowledge of fire, and who ate uncooked, unwashed vegetables and roots. The find was of capital importance from the light it threw on the problem of man'f ancestry, and Professor Keith, on examining the relic, declared that Mj Dawson and Dr Smith Woodward, whe co-operated with him, had discovereo what scientists had been hunting for for forty years—human remains dating from before the beginning of the first of the great <jlacial periods.