The following is my translation of an article called: Ein neuer Schädelfund in England von F. Br. It appeared in a German popular science magazine, Kosmos Handweiser für Naturfreunde 1913, Heft 4, Seiten 150-152. Unfortunately, no paragraphs are indicated in the text. However, I feel moved to insert a few according to my own judgement.
The original article is accompanied by three drawings. My translation isn't, so tough! Unknown to the author, the skull from Piltdown was a hoax involving a mixture of human and orangutan remains. Doubts about its authenticity were voiced in Kosmos by Hans Weinert n 1925 (p.427-428). By then, scepticism was rife as the skull and jaw didn't seem to belong together. Hopefully, I'll get around to translating that article at some stage. However, that was too late for F. Br. The identity and motives of the hoaxer remain unknown.
I'm not aware of any previous translation.
Trevor Dykes.

A new skull find in England by F. Br.
It was four years ago when workers, while digging street gravel from a trench on a hill in the English county of Sussex, happened upon a well preserved human skull, but they smashed it and threw it away. The paleontologist, Dawson, heard of this and, along with Dr Woodward, the conservationist of the Geology Department of the British Museum, he searched for further remains. In the spring of 1912, they managed to discover parts of a human skull. The find was introduced on 18th December, 1912 at a sitting of the English Geological Society. It consisted of the right half of a lower jaw and a large piece of a skull. As both objects were next to each other, it appears very probable that they belonged to the same individual.

If we first look at the lower jaw: The most obvious characteristic of the modern human jaw, the chin, is completely absent (Illustration 3; Fig. 1). The symphysis (Additional note: The word used is Knochenfügung.) is very wide. It is more so than for the Heidelberg jaw (Fig. 6) which, up till now, has been seen as the most primitive human jaw. The Heidelberg jaw has further traits that are more human than those of the new Sussex one, prime among them being its possession of human teeth whereas, with the Sussex one, according to the reconstruction by Dr Woodward (Fig. 1, thin line), the molars and incisors were probably very large. This jaw is very ape-like and presents a link between the chimpanzee (Fig. 7) and the Heidelberg jaw (Fig. 6).

The situation is entirely different for the skull. It already has human characteristics. The bulging bone of the eyebrow, known from the Neanderthal skull (Fig. 3) and Pithecanthropus erectus from Java (Fig. 2), is missing; the forehead flows only lightly. In both these respects, it is more highly developed than for those two previously mentioned skulls. However, the skull is double as thick as for a normal human skull. The lower part of the back of the head supposedly indicates an ape-like neck. The skull capacity s put at 1,000 cbcm. The skull capacity of primates (Fig. 7) is 400-500, that of Pithecanthropus erectus (Fig. 2) about 850, that of the Neanderthal people (Fig. 3) around 1,230, that of the lowest living savage about 1,200 (Fig. 5), and that of the modern European 1,300 to 1,500 cbcm and so, in this respect, the newly found skull would fit between the Neanderthaler and Pithecanthropus. Dr Woodward draws the conclusion from this, that it was the brain which developed first with the Ape man, and then the jaw was reshaped into a human form.

Determining the age of the skull is a very difficult issue. The discoverers found remains of elephants, mastodons and hippopotamuses in the same layer, and also flint tools from the earliest Stone Age. The remains of those animals come from the warm time of the Tertiary, but they were washed out of their original position and redeposited on one occasion, or more. The condition of the human find leads Sir Ray Lankaster to believe that it did not share this fate, but rather it was only deposited once in this grit. Therefore, we do not need to see the person as a contemporary of those animals; obviously, there is no decisive evidence contradicting that. Nevertheless, the Sussex human (Ill. 1 and 2) must be seen as at least Paleolithic, as flint tools of later periods were not found in the gravel.

An English artist, A Forestier, has already attempted a scientific reproduction of the new prehistoric person. The head (Ill. 2) is very successful. A beard was not included, but this is not because academics assume it to have been a female, rather so as not to obscure the characteristic lower jaw and dentition. For the image of the person in their natural environment, the artist has assumed that they date from the same time as the animal remains found at the same place. The question of age, however, is not yet resolved, and we can only hope that further finds might bring clarity.

An index of more of my translations of old Kosmos articles can be found at:

Kosmos Translations Archive

A number of Mesozoic (and post-Mesozoic) location summaries can be found at Localities.