It would be highly important were we able to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion as to what age must be attributed to the Piltdown jaw and skull. Did we know their age their true significance as a link between man and ape would be more easily estimated. The gravel in which they were found contains a handful, as it were, of the sweepings of the land surface of the great Weald valley of Sussex of all ages and periods since the emergence of the chalk from the ocean floor--an immense lapse of time, amounting probably to millions of years! In this sparse and inconspicuous patch of gravel we find fragments of teeth of mastodon and elephant and rhinoceros of Miocene and Pliocene age; we also find bones of quite late kinds of mammals of the Pleistocene period; we also find two kinds of roughly chipped flint instruments belonging the one to an earlier and the other to a later age. All are mixed up together in the gravel. When we come to the question as to which of these remains are of animals which were the contemporaries of Eoanthropus, all we can say is that Eoanthropus, the creature whose jaw was found at Piltdown, may have lived as late as the latest or as early as the earliest of the animals whose remains are associated with it. The Eoanthropus remains are not so heavily mineralized, it seems to me, as are the fragments of teeth of Miocene age found with them. At the same time, we have no ground for assuming that this creature made either the earlier or the later type of flint implements found with it, or was capable of such manufacture. I see no reason for supposing, whatever may be the age which we may have to attribute to Eoanthropus, that that creature was capable of flaking flints to a desired shape or of making fire or had developed the use of articulate speech. Nor is there any evidence to show that the humanly cut elephant-bone recently found at Piltdown by Mr. Dawson was cut by Eoanthropus. It is more probable that this was done by a more highly developed creature of the genus Homo. In fact, the only ground which at present justifies the association of Eoanthropus with the Hominidæ or human series rather than with the Simiidæ or ape series--derived from a common ancestry--is the man-like rather than ape-like size of the brain, which we must attribute to Eoanthropus on the assumption, which is at present a reasonable one, that the half-jaw and the incomplete skull found near each other at Piltdown are parts of the same individual.[13]