Races of man / by Sonia Cole.

  • Sonia Mary Cole
Date:
1965
Catalogue details
    46/150 page 41
    Racial Origins The appearance and way of life of early man may be reconstructed both by the study of his bones and artifacts and by observations on the features and cultures of living primitive peoples. This chapter is concerned mainly with the origin of races in so far as they may be traced from fossil skeletal remains, from the begin ning of the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age over a million years ago to the end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. One of the basic principles of evolution is that all features do not evolve at the same rate. Man's pelvis and limb bones became adapted for walking erect long before his brain grew relatively larger than that of the apes. The increased size of the brain-case and height of the vault of the skull, with its consequences on the whole shape of the head and face, is the most striking feature of the early stages of man's evolution. Since the end of Pleistocene times, however, the size of the brain has certainly not increased and in fact may have decreased ; many of the Upper Palaeolithic people had larger brains than their descendants. Other impor tant modifications have been a decreased thickness in the walls of the skull5 the growth of a projecting chin; the reduction in size of the jaws; and the reduction of ridges of bone which had served to reinforce the attachment of powerful jaw- and neck-muscles. The bony brow-ridges or supra-orbital torus for the attachment of muscles used in chewing were characteristic of early man and survived into Upper Pleisto cene times. Extinct races such as Neanderthal Man had many such specialized features, whereas modern man, like his early ape ancestors, is essentially un- specialized. The Australian aborigines are nearest to the specialized Upper Pleisto cene races (Fig. 5). Australoids, and to a lesser degree Caucasoids, have 'mature' (gerontomorphic) or rugged faces, whereas Negroids and particularly Mongoloids have 'infantile' (pedomorphic) faces which are more advanced in the evolutionary sense.
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