Loren C. Eiseley

Archaeological Observations On the Problem of Post-Glacial Extinction

In a recent paper notable for its lucid presentation of certain of the wider problems confronting the American anthropologist in his attempt to unravel New World prehistory, Dr. A. L. Kroeber has touched, doubtless with justified trepidation, upon the problem of Folsom man in America. That subject has indeed suffered but little illumination in so far as its relation to the rest of the American archaeological record is concerned, and Dr. Kroeber, with sturdy honesty, minces no words in pointing out the hiatus which intervenes between this early horizon and later cultures. It is, he warns, dangerous to produce “speculative bridges that quickly tend to run into fantasy.” He notes that “the earlier date, the longer time span, have an inherent attractiveness to most human minds.” “So long,” he says, “as there is a real possibility that some of the associations of human artifacts with extinct animals may be no more than three thousand years old, it is certainly not wise to build interpretations on the contrary possibility that some of them may be twenty-five thousand years old.”

Fossil Man and Human Evolution

Dr. Eiseley is Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the Uni? versity of Pennsylvania, and Curator of Early Man in the University Museum. He is a contributor of scientific articles on fossil man and related subjects to learned journals, as well as to literary magazines. He was former Vice-President of the American Anthropological Association, and Vice-Chairman of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology, National Research Council, 1950-1952.

Racial and Phylogenetic Distinctions in the Intertemporal Interangular Index

INTRODUCTION The percentage which the minimum frontal width bears to the breadth of the skull as taken between the two projecting angular processes (zygomatic) of the frontal bone has received comparatively little attention in the literature of physical anthropology. Sir Arthur Keith noted that the index is lower among the palaeanthropic forms of man and pointed out (1) that due to the fact that the supraorbital torus is reduced in modern man, the difference between the two measurements is less marked. Hence he regards the index as of phylogenetic significance. Keith and McCown in their recent comprehensive survey of the Skhfil material (2) from Palestine reassert this view, but only in passing. Cameron, on the other hand, devotes an entire paper to