Science: Old Heads

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At the time he wrote, Professor Broom had made no attempt to free the fossil from its rocky matrix, as the bones were brittle to the point of crumbling. When they are finally freed, complete scientific scrutiny may establish the right of Australopithecus to a place in man's evolutionary prolog. Meanwhile, says Dr. Broom, the discovery shows that "we had in South Africa in Pleistocene times large non-forest living anthropoids—not very closely allied to either the chimpanzee or the gorilla but showing a number of typical human characteristics not met with in any of the living anthropoids."

¶ Between the years 1912 and 1914 Mr. Charles Dawson found in a stratum of gravel at Piltdown Sussex, fragments of a fossilized skull and jaw which were reconstructed by Sir Arthur Smith Woodward as Eoanthropus, the famed man of Piltdown. Some scholars refused to believe at first that a skull so human could be associated with a jaw so apelike, but present-day consensus is that the fragments actually belonged to one individual. Most anthropologists—notably excepting Sir Arthur Keith—hold that the Piltdown man, like the Pekin man and the Java apeman, were offshoot types which died out and were not on the ancestral line of Homo sapiens. Nevertheless Piltdown appeared to be the oldest near-human inhabitant of England to come to light, and his age was variously estimated at 100,000 to 300,000 years.

Last year a London dentist and archeologist named Alvan T. Marston found a primitive skull fragment in the gravel at Swanscombe, Kent. Few months later a bigger piece, the left parietal bone, was discovered. In his latest report to Nature Dr. Marston stated that his skull is more primitive in a number of points—including a lower and more sloping vault, "flat ruggedness and non-filled out contours"—than the skull of the Piltdown man, and therefore that the Swanscombe man should be assigned his rightful place as England's oldest oldster.

¶ Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, famed Bohemian-born anthropologist of the Smithsonian Institution, in the summer usually goes to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska with a gang of amateur helpers to study traces of prehistoric migration from Asia. Last summer he brought back great quantities of weapons, household utensils, stone lamps, plates, amulets, skeletons. Last week the Smithsonian Institution announced that among this material had been found the largest skull ever recorded on the Western Hemisphere. The cranial capacity was 2,005 cubic centimetres. Average for modern man is 1,450 cc. World record is still held by the great Russian Novelist, Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), with 2,030 cc.

The Aleutian skull appeared perfectly normal, with no evidence of giantism which would have thickened it, or of hydrocephaly ("water on the brain") which would have deformed it. The shape was symmetrical, the forehead impressive. Dr. Hrdlicka believed that it belonged to a brainy Aleut of ordinary stature who inhabited the islands some centuries before the coming of the Russians.