Precious Child

It was a lucky thing for anthropology that Dr. Ales Hrdlicka (pronounced ah-leesh hurd-leech-ka), famed fossil man of the Smithsonian Institution, was in Moscow last week. A young Soviet archeologist named A. P. Okladnikoff announced the discovery of a fossilized Neanderthal skeleton on a high cliff in "Middle Asia." The bones were those of a child eight or nine years old.

The exact location was not disclosed, but central Asia is thousands of miles farther east than any Neanderthal remains hitherto discovered. Since Soviet science is more notable for enthusiasm than for scholarly caution, some skeptics might have wondered whether the skeleton was really a Neanderthal child or just the luckless progeny of some more recent Mongol wanderer. Dr. Hrdlicka, however, pronounced it a genuine Neanderthal specimen, left no doubt that was one of the most precious childr in anthropology's bare nursery. Dr. Hrdlicka knows.

The body bones are badly crushed and the back of the skull is bashed in, but the skull is otherwise in excellent shape, the jaws and teeth almost complete. Said Dr. Hrdlicka: "We had been hoping, but hardly daring to hope, for some such discovery, and now this young Soviet archeologist has done it. It shows that Neanderthal Man was widely spread over the Old World. For the first time it gives us evidence of a culture extending clear across Europe to the Far East."

Neanderthal fossils, first found at Gibraltar in 1848, first scientifically described in 1856 from a find in the Neanderthal Gorge near Duesseldorf in Germany, have been discovered also in France, Belgium, Spain, Moravia, Croatia, Palestine, on the island of Jersey in the British Channel, on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean. This oldtimer persisted for a long but chronologically vague period, perhaps 150,000, perhaps 40,000 years ago. With his low-vaulted skull, huge eye-sockets and a short, broad nose, Neanderthal Man was no beauty, but he had just as big a brain and far better teeth than men of today. He made good tools, ceremoniously buried his dead, found shelter by intrepidly evicting bears from their caves. Near the close of the Glacial Age he was replaced by more modern types of men, who apparently feasted on Neanderthal carcasses. But while he lasted, as the Asiatic find made clear last week, Neanderthal Man got around.

It seems likely that, before becoming extinct, Neanderthal Man interbred with the more highly evolved men who supplanted and sometimes ate him. Dr. Hrdlicka thinks that many living people have Neanderthal blood in their veins (or more precisely, Neanderthal genes in their germ plasm), points to suspiciously Neanderthaloid features which crop out in 20th Century humans.

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