Abstract
SIR ARTHUR KEITH'S lectures on recent discoveries of fossil men, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons during the month of May, and published in an abridged form in this week's Supplement, are likely to provide material for argument among anthropologists for some time to come. During the last decade, but especially in the last four or five years, there have been some remarkable accessions to our knowledge of early types of man. Palestine, Gibraltar, South Africa, East Africa, and most recently China, each in turn has yielded to the spade new types or new variants of known types. Each of these discoveries, it is safe to assume, helps us a stage on the way to final truth; but for the moment, it must be admitted, they add to the complexity of the problem which the anthropologist seeks to solve. Sir Arthur Keith's lectures, in a comprehensive survey of the new material, aimed at showing how it could be adapted in building up a scheme of the origin, development, and distribution of early man. One of the most interesting of recent discoveries with which he dealt—probably quite new to most of his audience—was that of the remarkable skull from Gardar in south-west Greenland, for the description of which he was indebted to Dr. Hansen of Copenhagen. This skull is not, indeed, one of high antiquity, for it was found in association with the remains of Norsemen in a twelfth-century graveyard; but whether it be regarded as atavistic, as Dr. Hansen holds, or pathological as Sir Arthur Keith is inclined to think, its remarkable character, which would place it in a class with the more primitive types of fossil men, invests it with the utmost significance morphologically irrespective of its date. It is possible, as Sir Arthur said, that it reproduces a stage of man's evolution which may yet be discovered in a fossil state. It is, perhaps, not inapposite to point out that the Neanderthal skull itself was once considered to be pathological.
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[News and Views]. Nature 125, 944–949 (1930). https://doi.org/10.1038/125944c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/125944c0