Old Heads

In November 1924 a blast was fired in a limestone quarry near Taungs in Bechuanaland, South Africa. In the material that tumbled to the foot of the cliff were fossil fragments from a cave which the blast had exposed. The manager gathered the fossil-bearing chunks together, handed them to a Johannesburg geologist named Young who was stopping by on business. Dr. Young took them to Dr. Raymond Arthur Dart, professor of anatomy at the University of Johannesburg. Laboriously scraping away the rocky mineral, Professor Dart uncovered a small, fragmentary skull with the face almost intact. The scientist quickly realized that he had in his hands one of the most important evolutionary finds since the discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus, the ape-man of Java. Geological evidence indicated that the skull, whose owner was christened Australopithecus, was 500,000 to 1,000,000 years old.

Much of the uncertainty over the status of Australopithecus was due to his extreme youth. He was not more than six years old when he died. The jaw contained 20 milk teeth, four permanent teeth. Dr. Dart placed him at the base of the human evolutionary stem. But Sir Arthur Keith, while admitting certain manlike features, put him on the same branch with gorillas and chimpanzees, though on a separate twig. After several years the lower jaw was detached from the upper, and the crowns of the milk teeth were seen to be almost wholly human in form. Dr. William King Gregory of Columbia, a world authority on the dental development of primates, located the Taungs skull close to the point of human origin.

One of those who agreed with Professor Dart from the first in placing Australopihecus "in or near the line by which man las arisen" was Dr. Robert Broom, paleontologist of the Transvaal Museum in retoria. Last July another blast in another limestone quarry, this time at Sterkfontein, turned up another fossil brain case. The manager, urged by Dr. Broom to keep his eyes peeled for a Taungs ape, landed this to the scientist. Feverish earch disclosed the upper face, the skull base, the right jawbone with three teeth, a detached molar. Last week in Nature appeared a letter from Dr. Broom describing his find, with three photographs and a drawing.

To Dr. Broom's joy the Sterkfontein skull was that of an adult, with fairly heavy brow ridges and a brain capacity of about 600 cc. He found some resemblances to the Taungs skull and some differences, therefore put his fossil in the same genus with Australopithecus but in a different species. Name: Australopithecus transvaalensis Broom. One molar which he was able to examine closely showed close affinities to Dryopithecus, a well-known genus of extinct apes. It is from a generalized type of Dryopithecus that most anthropologists believe man evolved.

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."

P: 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.

P: 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.

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