Word: marston
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First Englishman. In 1935 another amateur digger, London Dentist Alvan T. Marston, found a fossil bone 24 ft. below the surface in Swanscombe's Barnfield...
...proved to be the occipital (posterior) bone of a human skull, and its position in a stratum containing crude flint hand axes and the bones of long-extinct animals made it exciting news in anthropological circles. Marston soon found a second bone (left parietal) which fitted the first bone perfectly. The two bones were enough to give some idea of an extremely ancient kind of man who lived along the Thames about 250,000 years ago, before the last of the great glaciers crept over England...
Ever since Marston's find, diggers have haunted Barnfield Pit. Most persistent haunters were the Wymers. Bertram Wymer had been digging for antiquities since he was 19. His wife adopted his hobby on their honeymoon, and son John started digging as soon as he was old enough to handle a small trowel. In Barnfield Pit they found plenty of crude flint tools, but for years neither they nor other diggers found anything very interesting. The great prizes-more bones of "the first Englishman" or clues to the life he led-did not show up in hundreds of tons...
Last July came a change of luck. Son John found a right parietal skull bone. It fitted precisely the two bones found by Marston, and proved that "the first Englishman" (probably a young woman) had an essentially modern brain. A wave of excitement brought hordes of diggers to Barnfield Pit. But still almost nothing was known about how the first Englishmen lived...
...fatal indelicacy of touch, whether from Director Don Marston or belonging to the untalent of the cast, blurs the Adams House production so that positive identification of what seems at times a perceptive interpretation is impossible...