Unveiling Man's Origins (Routledge Revivals) by L. S. B. Leakey Vanne Morris Goodall

Author:L. S. B. Leakey, Vanne Morris Goodall [L. S. B. Leakey, Vanne Morris Goodall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Cultural & Social, Physical
ISBN: 9781317831235
Google: l164AwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-06-03T05:56:42+00:00

* In this chapter we shall consider the circumstances surrounding the discovery and the description of the Piltdown skull and mandible. In Chapter XII, we shall discuss the exposure of this fraud, the perpetration of which did so much to cloud the minds of writers on human evolution for many years to come.

Chapter IX

1920–1929

By 1920 the reverberations of the War of 1914–1918 were dying away, and with the return to peace-time conditions a widespread and vigorous search was resumed for the fossil remains of ancestral man. Prehistory was now an established branch of science and it was becoming common practice for expeditions to be sponsored by the great scientific institutions and foundations. The standard of field work improved as more funds became available and special new techniques for the excavation and preservation of specimens began to be established. Progress was spectacular and discoveries in Asia, Africa and Europe followed one another in rapid succession. Dubois' discovery of Pithecanthropus had greatly strengthened the theory that man was cradled in Asia but, during the decade under review, new evidence was found in Africa which began to make it seem more probable that man's earliest ancestors would ultimately be found in that continent, as Darwin had predicted.

The discoveries were made in three widely separated areas. From East Africa came the news that Dr L. S. B. Leakey, senior author of the present book, had excavated the remains of relatively recent Stone Age hominids at Nakuru, Elmenteita and Gamble's Cave. Leakey's work proved to be of importance to the story of human evolution, since the uncovering of these prehistoric sites shed new light on the spread of man and his cultures in Africa. ‘All the world knows’, wrote Keith in 1925, ‘that Sir Arthur Evans … restored to Europe a most important chapter which was missing from the early history of her civilization. Mr Leakey is now doing for Africa what Sir Arthur Evans did for Europe.’

In 1921 reports came from Northern Rhodesia that the remains of a hitherto unknown species of hominid had been found in a lead and zinc mine at Broken Hill. Though no fossil human remains had previously come to light in the region, cultural evidence suggesting that early man had once occupied the caves of this district had already been discovered. ‘Rhodesian Man’ was soon being discussed in many parts of the world. The remains, including an almost complete skull, part of a hip bone and two ends of a femur as well as a tibia were not, in the strictest sense of the term, fossilized. They had been protected from disintegration by an incrustation of mineral salts of zinc and lead. In these unusual circumstances any determination of ‘Rhodesian Man's’ place in the human family had to be based on the anatomical evidence of the bones them-selves. The problem was further complicated, as it must always be when anatomists are confronted by a random collection of bones, by the uncertainty as to whether the specimens were, in fact, the remains of a single individual.

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