Skeleton lately found at the Tilbury Docks, Essex. 143
rude and polished implements, whose shape affords the chief
evidence as to age; or, on the other, to divide human remains
dating before and after a certain geological period, they are
useful. But it must always be remembered that geological
position furnishes the only absolute test of comparative age,
and that to attempt to modify that test, where it exists, by
appeals to other considerations is but to introduce confusion.
The true importance of the Tilbury skeleton—to judge from
the accounts at present available—lies in the fact that it is
a skeleton of prehistoric man much resembling that of
Neanderthal, so much discussed twenty years ago. And
skeletons of prehistoric man are so extremely rare, and his
flint implements so (comparatively) numerous, that we may
well rejoice more over one skeleton than over many bushels
of flint implements, which cannot tell us whether their users
were as elegantly made as some of the South Sea Islanders,
or as clumsy as the Eskimo. Whether our Tilbury man will
give rise to as much discussion as the Neanderthal skeleton
remains to be seen. But, supposing the likeness between the
two to be as great as it is reported to be,6 the Tilbury speci-
men goes far to show that we have in each a normal type of
prehistoric man, and not—as some anatomists used to assert
of the Neanderthal—utterly abnormal examples. For the
probability, always of the slightest, that the Neanderthal
skeleton is that of an extremely exceptional person, sinks
almost to zero on the finding of another specimen of the same
singular type at Tilbury, especially when we consider the
extreme rarity of prehistoric human skeletons. And it is
worth noting that the age of these two examples is probably
not dissimilar. All that can be confidently stated as to the
Tilbury man's age is that he lived in the prehistoric era of
Britain, many years before the embankment of the Thames
during the Roman occupation. His skeleton having been
found in the sand, below the inundation-mud, was no doubt
deposited in the then channel of the river, at some point
where the motion of the water was very slight. It is noticed
6 Sir Richard Owen's illustrations—published since the reading of this
paper—show that the two skulls strikingly resemble each other.