  Continuum and lattice analyses have revealed the existence of a mass-scale in
the gluon two-point Schwinger function. It has long been conjectured that this
expresses the action of a Schwinger mechanism for gauge boson mass generation
in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). For such to be true, it is necessary and
sufficient that a dynamically-generated, massless, colour-carrying, scalar
gluon+gluon correlation emerge as a feature of the dressed three-gluon vertex.
Working with results on elementary Schwinger functions obtained via the
numerical simulation of lattice-regularised QCD, we establish with an extremely
high level of confidence that just such a feature appears; hence, confirm the
conjectured origin of the gluon mass scale.
