Abstract
IN 1925 there appeared an annotation in L'Anthropologie1 directing attention to the discoveries of ancient man and of his cultures then being made in the Crimea by G. A. Bonč-Osmolovskij, conservator of the Russian Museum in Leningrad. The chief site of these discoveries was the grotto or rock-shelter of Kiik-Koba, situated in the foothills of the Yaila Mountains, which run from Sebastopol towards the Kerch Straits. In the deepest and oldest stratum of the grotto were found fossil remains of part of a human skeleton; these were reported to be Neanderthal in character; they were examined by the late Dr. Marcelin Boule, who confirmed this diagnosis. The Crimea was then the most easterly point from which Neanderthal man had been reported. Students of early man were deeply interested in the discoveries reported by their Russian colleague and have eagerly awaited his full report—so far in vain. Recently my interest in Kiik-Koba was heightened by an article published in Man by Prof. Gordon Childe2, in which the strata of the grotto are identified as similar in age and in sequence to those which yielded the fossil men of Mount Carmel—the subject of a report published by Dr. Theodore McCown and myself in 19393. In February of the present year (1944) a pleasant surprise awaited me; on opening a parcel bearing the Moscow postmark, I found within a volume entitled—in the French translation kindly supplied by the author—"L'Homme fossile de la Grotte de Kiik-Koba (Crimée)". I found it to be Part 2 of the "Paleolit Kryma"*, published in Moscow in 1941. Part 1, which gives an account of the strata of the grotto and of their contents, was published in 1940. Inside the cover of the book which came to me so unexpectedly, the author has written an inscription in English; it is signed G. A. Bonč-Osmolovskij and dated December 10, 1942. Considering theobstacles which lay between the author and myself, the wonder is, not that the book took more than a year to reach me, but that it ever arrived.
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References
Keith, Sir A., "New Discoveries relating to the Antiquity of Man" (1931), 363.
Childe, V. Gordon, Man, 98 (1942).
McCown and Keith, "The Stone Age of Mount Carmel. The Fossil Human Bemains from the Levalloiso-Mousterian", 2 (1939).
Garrod, D. A. E., and Bate, D. M. A., "The Stone Age of Mount Carmel", 1 (1937).
See under 4, p. 139.
Keith, Sir A., Amer. J. Phys. Anthrop., 26, 251 (1940).
Marston, Alvan T., J. Roy. Anthrop. Inst., 67, 339 (1937).
Keith, Sir A., J. Anat., 73, 155 and 234 (1939).
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KEITH, A. Pre-Neanderthal Man in the Crimea. Nature 153, 515–517 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/153515a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/153515a0