The beginnings of human palaeontology: prehistory, craniometry and the ‘fossil human races’

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW R. GOODRUM
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Historic Period ◽  
Critical Information ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hominid Fossils ◽  
Human Fossils

AbstractSince the nineteenth century, hominid palaeontology has offered critical information about prehistoric humans and evidence for human evolution. Human fossils discovered at a time when there was growing agreement that humans existed during the Ice Age became especially significant but also controversial. This paper argues that the techniques used to study human fossils from the 1850s to the 1870s and the way that these specimens were interpreted owed much to the anthropological examination of Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age skeletons retrieved by archaeologists from prehistoric tombs throughout Europe. What emerged was the idea that a succession of distinct human races, which were identified using techniques such as craniometry, had occupied and migrated into Europe beginning in the Ice Age and continuing into the historic period. This marks a phase in the history of human palaeontology that gradually gave way to a science of palaeoanthropology that viewed hominid fossils more from the perspective of evolutionary theory and hominid phylogeny.

The Legacy of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’

2019 ◽  
pp. 156-195
Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Student ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

The penultimate chapter looks at the longer-term impact of the efflorescence of evolutionary speculation in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh on later generations of natural historians. First it examines the evangelical reaction against progressive models of the history of life and its role in the eclipse of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians.’ Next it examines to the evolutionary theory proposed by Robert Chambers in his anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to assess its possible debt to the Edinburgh transformists of the 1820s and 1830s. Finally it turns to the important question of the possible influence of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’ on Charles Darwin during his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in the years 1825 to 1827, during which period he rubbed shoulders with many of the key proponents of evolutionary ideas in the city.

scholarly journals The Early History of Glacial Theory in British Geology

1970 ◽  
Vol 9 (55) ◽  
pp. 135-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bert Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early History ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
Glacial Epoch ◽  
Drift Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas

AbstractMuch of the history of British geological thought in the second quarter of the nineteenth century centered on problems which are now explained by reference to the events of the Ice Age. This paper reviews the data and theories then current among British geologists as the background of the British response to Louis Agassiz’s “modern” theory of a glacial epoch. Today, as we read Agassiz’s amazing speculation, our own sympathy for the striking accuracy of his ideas masks from us the difficulty they faced in gaining acceptance. By first examining the context into which the glacial theory was introduced, we can then appreciate the novelty of Agassiz's efforts and understand the long delay in their achieving prominence. The present examination suggests that this delay was due to the unfortunate merger of Agassiz’s new ideas with the older drift theory of Charles Lyell.

Ice, Fire and Flood: A Short Pre-history of Climate Fiction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Andrew Milner ◽  
J.R. Burgmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Climate Fiction ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Global Heating

This chapter argues that catastrophic climate change fictions have been organised around three main tropes: the new ice age, the burning world and the drowned world. Of these, only the last has a deep history in the Western mythos, dating back to stories of a Great Flood in Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh. When modern science fiction (SF) began to take shape in the early nineteenth century, it inherited a preoccupation with the Flood from its parent cultures, for example, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Richard Jefferies’s After London and Jules Verne’s Sans dessus dessous. This flood motif continued to be important in American pulp SF. Cooling and warming are more recent preoccupations, dating from the widespread acceptance of ice age theory and greenhouse theory in the late nineteenth century. For most of the twentieth century both science and SF were more interested in cooling. But in the closing quarter of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, widespread scientific concern that anthropogenic warming might more than offset longer-term cooling led to the development of contemporary ‘cli-fi’, concerned primarily with the effects of global heating.

‘Hurrah for the missing link!’: a history of apes, ancestors and a crucial piece of evidence

2011 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter C. Kjærgaard
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Fossil Record ◽  
Animal Kingdom ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Evolution By Natural Selection

In the nineteenth century the idea of a ‘missing link’ connecting humans with the rest of the animal kingdom was eagerly embraced by professional scientists and popularizers. After the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, many tied the idea and subsequent search for a crucial piece of evidence to Darwin and his formulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection. This article demonstrates that the expression was widely used and that the framework for discussions about human's relation to the apes and gaps in the fossil record were well in place and widely debated long before Origin of Species became the standard reference for discussing human evolution. In the second half of the century the missing link gradually became the ultimate prize in palaeoanthropology and grew into one of the most powerful, celebrated and criticized icons of human evolution.

scholarly journals The Early History of Glacial Theory in British Geology

1970 ◽  
Vol 9 (55) ◽  
pp. 135-141
Author(s):  
Bert Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early History ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
Glacial Epoch ◽  
Drift Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas

AbstractMuch of the history of British geological thought in the second quarter of the nineteenth century centered on problems which are now explained by reference to the events of the Ice Age. This paper reviews the data and theories then current among British geologists as the background of the British response to Louis Agassiz’s “modern” theory of a glacial epoch. Today, as we read Agassiz’s amazing speculation, our own sympathy for the striking accuracy of his ideas masks from us the difficulty they faced in gaining acceptance. By first examining the context into which the glacial theory was introduced, we can then appreciate the novelty of Agassiz's efforts and understand the long delay in their achieving prominence. The present examination suggests that this delay was due to the unfortunate merger of Agassiz’s new ideas with the older drift theory of Charles Lyell.

The Climate of Prehistoric Britain

Antiquity ◽  
1927 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 412-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. E. P. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Peat Bogs ◽  
North West ◽  
Dry Conditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Swiss Lake ◽  
Glacial Clays ◽  
Boreal Period

After the latest glacial advance of the Quaternary Ice Age, the climate of north-west Europe did not simply recover to its present level, but underwent a series of fluctuations, at times becoming warmer and drier than at present, and again approaching glacial conditions. The pioneer in the investigation of these postglacial climatic changes was the Norwegian Axel Blytt, who as long ago as 1876 made out a succession of dry and wet periods, which he termed Boreal, Atlantic, sub-Boreal and sub-Atlantic. The existence of these four periods has been abundantly confirmed; they are best shown in the peat-bogs of Norway and Sweden, where they are represented by layers of tree-stools alternating with beds of peat, but they have now been connected with de Geer's geochronological time-scale derived from the banded glacial clays. It is found that the dry, mainly cool Boreal period extended from about 6500 to 5200 B.C., the moist warm Atlantic period from 5200 to 3000 B.c., the dry warm sub-Boreal from 3000 to 850 B.C., and the wet cool sub-Atlantic from 850 B.C., to about 300 A.D. Thus the Neolithic in north-west Europe falls partly in the Atlantic and partly in the sub-Boreal period; the Bronze Age entirely in the latter. The early Iron Age, on the other hand, falls mainly in the sub-Atlantic.A succession of dry and wet periods can be recognized over a wide area in northern and central Europe and again in Scotland and Ireland. The Swiss lake-dwellings are strong evidence of a dry climate during much of the Neolithic, because when they were established the levels of the lakes must have been very much lower than at present, especially if, as seems probable, the dwellings were first built not in the waters of the lakes but on peat-bogs on their Neolithic shores. In Scotland James Geikie obtained a sequence similar to Blytt's, though he stressed the changes of temperature rather than of rainfall. Geikie named his stages Lower Forestian, Lower Turbarian (i.e. Lower Peat), Upper Forestian and Upper Turbarian. The Scottish peat mosses have since been examined more closely by F. J. Lewis1, who found that the Upper Forest Bed extended over the whole mainland of Scotland almost to Cape Wrath, rising in places to nearly 3000 feet above sea level, or far above the present limit of trees. In the Highlands however it is split into two layers separated by one to three feet of peat, indicating a break in the dry conditions. It is interesting that a similar break in the dry Neolithic climate is shown by the history of the Swiss lake-dwellings. The Upper Forest layer is not found in the Shetlands.

scholarly journals Coleções osteológicas identificadas: importância para a antropologia

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Luisa Santos
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Geographic Distribution ◽  
Continuous Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
North And South America ◽  
Number Of Individuals ◽  
North And South

One of the main pillars of bioanthropological studies are the identified osteological collections. The goal of this document is to describe this heritage and show its importance. Since the nineteenth century, several countries have collected sets of skulls and skeletons from people about whom we know some biographical data; among other details, their age when they died and their sex. There are currently around fifty collections in different countries of North and South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Researching into them has applications for the study of human evolution, past populations, palaeopathology, and the history of medicine, among others. The need to increase the number of individuals and extend the geographic distribution of samples leads to the continuous development of these collections.

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