The section of the gravel bed (Fig. 64) indicates that the remains of the Piltdown man were washed down with other fossils by a shallow stream charged with dark-brown gravel and unworked flints; some of these fossils were of Pliocene times from strata of the upper parts of the stream. In this channel were found the remains of a number of animals of the same age as the Piltdown man, a few flints resembling eoliths, and one very primitive worked flint of Pre-Chellean type, which may also have been washed down from deposits of earlier age. These precious geologic and archæologic records furnish the only means we have of determining the age of _Eoanthropus_, the 'dawn man,' one of the most important and significant discoveries in the whole history of anthropology. We are indebted to the geologist Charles Dawson and the palæontologist Arthur Smith Woodward for preserving these ancient records and describing them with great fulness and accuracy as follows (pp. 132 to 139): Several years ago Dawson discovered a small portion of an unusually thick human parietal bone, taken from a gravel bed which was being dug for road-making purposes on a farm close to Piltdown Common. In the autumn of 1911 he picked up among the rain-washed spoil-heaps of the same gravel-pit another and larger piece of bone belonging to the forehead region of the same skull and including a portion of the ridge extending over the left eyebrow. Immediately impressed with the importance of this discovery, Dawson enlisted the co-operation of Smith Woodward, and a systematic search was made in these spoil-heaps and gravels, beginning in the spring of 1912; all the material was looked over and carefully sifted. It appears that the whole or greater part of the human skull had been scattered by the workmen, who had thrown away the pieces unnoticed. Thorough search in the bottom of the gravel bed itself revealed the right half of a jaw, which was found in a depression of undisturbed, finely stratified gravel, so far as could be judged on the spot identical with that from which the first portions of the cranium were exhumed. A yard from the jaw an important piece of the occipital bone of the skull was found. Search was renewed in 1913 by Father P. Teilhard, of Chardin, a French anthropologist, who fortunately recovered a single canine tooth, and later a pair of nasal bones were found, all of which fragments are of very great significance in the restoration of the skull. [Illustration: FIG. 64. Geologic section of the Piltdown gravel bed, showing in restored outlines at the bottom of layer 3 the position in which the fragments of the skull and jaw were found. After Dawson. 1. Surface soil, with flints. Thickness = 1 foot. 2. Pale-yellow sandy loam with gravel and flints. One Palæolithic worked flint was found in the middle of this bed. Thickness = 2 feet, 6 inches.