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PITHECANTHROPUS ERECTUS.

Java, at Trinil, in the Ngawa district of the Madiun Residency, a great number of fossil skeletal parts of other vertebrate animals belonging to the same species as those found by me during five years of researches at many other places in the same strata, which lie exposed over some hundreds of square kilometers. To judge from the uplifting which these strata have undergone, in the course of which they have all been tilted (at Trinil about 5 degrees south), and also from other geological evidence, they are older than the Pleistocene, apparently older than the early Pliocene. They are of a fluviatile character, and lie, more than 350 meters thick, unconformably, upon marine strata, which K. Martin, in Leyden, has determined as Pliocene.

Smithsonian Report (1898), 0528.png

Fig. I.—Section of the ossiferous strata at Trinil


A, area of growing plants; B, soft sandstone; C, lapilli stratum; D, level at which the skeletal remains were found; E, conglomerate; F, argillaceous layer; G, marine breccia; H, wet-season level of the river; I, dry-season level of the river.

According to the fauna, also, as far as I have been able to study it up to this time, it is highly probable that the strata are early Pliocene. This fauna is very similar to the fossil vertebrate fauna of western India, but appears to be younger than the Siwalik fauna of the early Miocene or later Pliocene and somewhat older than the fauna of Narbada, which has been placed in the earliest Pleistocene.

At the place where the remains were discovered at Trinil the strata, everywhere composed of volcanic tufa, lie exposed in the cliff-like decliv-