Abstract
IN a letter appearing in a recent issue of NATURE (June 4, p. 1010) Sir Arthur Keith, commenting on the significance of the Florisbad skull for the study of the origins and distribution of early racial types and its place in the African series of primitive forms of man, drew a remarkable, and at first sight startling, conclusion from a recent examination of a cast of the skull. Pointing, in full agreement, to the anatomical analysis by Dr. Alex. Galloway of the characters of the Florisbad find, from which it appears that Neanderthaloid characteristics are here found accompanying features such as occur in the Boskop skull—a ‘modern’ type, which Sir Arthur regards as proto-Bushman—he goes on to suggest that not only is Florisbad man a transitional form from Rhodesian man to Boskop man, as Dr. Galloway maintains, but also that he heralds the modern Hottentot and Bushman races of South Africa. The skull is, he says, “ a mosaic of Rhodesian, Boskop and Bush characters”.
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Prehistory in South Africa. Nature 141, 1115–1116 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/1411115a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1411115a0