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By Root 1349 0

still enthusiastic as in youth, and an ardent believer of the antiquity of man in Argentina. He recited freely his recollection of the finding of the skull, stating in substance: The piece of skull was brought to him by the foreman of a gang of workmen who were digging out the rudder-pit. He (Mr. Junor) was very much occupied at the time by duties of supervision of construction and did not see the skull taken out, nor did he examine the place afterward to see where it came from; but he had no doubt that it came out of the well, ‘probably’ from between a layer of tosca and the underlying sand. The skull was said to have been found by a workman, who passed it to the foreman, who in turn gave it to Mr. Junor. The workman cannot now be identified. It does not appear that he was ever questioned as to how the bone was found. . . . On one point Mr. Junor was positive: The fragment of skull was taken out of the well. And although this statement rests on the say-so of the foreman who was told so by a workman, it appears to be the one item in the early history of the find that is not open to serious doubt” (Hrdlicka 1912, pp. 343–344).

Some will be critical of the fact that the skull was not found in place by a scientist. One should note, however, that the Heidelberg jaw, which is accepted by paleoanthropologists as genuine, was uncovered by a workman in a sand pit in Germany and turned over to a foreman, who in turn brought it to the attention of a local professor (Section 7.2). Many of the Homo erectus specimens from Java, reports of which have found their way into all authoritative textbooks, were collected by Javanese laborers while scientists were absent from the sites (Section 7.3). A more recent example is the Petralona skull, which Greek villagers found in a spot not clearly designated. Despite this, scientists, on stratigraphic grounds, assign the Petralona skull an age of 200,000 to 300,000 years (Gowlett 1984, p. 87), and use it as evidence for an evolutionary transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens.

Willis speculated that the Buenos Aires skull had somehow arrived quite recently in the position in which it was found. In discussing this possibility, Willis gave the known details of the construction of the dry dock. First an embankment was built to keep out the river, and to keep the excavation dry there was a pump operating from the sump or well in the lowest place. Then a concrete floor was laid, and concrete walls were built. Finally the rudder pit was dug. It was during the digging of the rudder pit that the skull was found. Willis suggested: “Any objects contained in the material excavated [in the course of building the dry dock] or in the standing earth exposed at the side might have found their way into the close vicinity of the rudder-pit, if not into the pit itself” (Hrdlicka 1912, p. 344). But by the time the pit was dug, the concrete walls and floor of the dry dock were already completed, which would mean there should not have been much dirt piled around on the floor or exposed on the walls. Plus there is abundant testimony that the skull was in fact found under a hard layer of tosca and was not lying loose at the top of the pit before digging took place.

Willis added: “We were told by Dr. Francesco Moreno that he, when a boy, used to go swimming where the dry dock now is, in deep pools” (Hrdlicka 1912, p. 345). Willis noted that a few kilometers away from the dry dock, there is a place where the river “has worked out deep irregular holes into which anything like the skull-cap called Diprothomo would readily sink and where it would become buried lower than the surface of the Pampaean, but beneath recent river mud” (Hrdlicka 1912, p. 345). There is, however, no basis for saying this occurred at the dry dock, where the skull was found beneath a layer of tosca in an excavation fully 11 meters (36 feet) below the present bed of the river La Plata.

As previously mentioned, Ameghino thought his Diprothomo represented an ancestral form of human. According to Hrdlicka (1912, p. 323), he believed the skull’s capacity