Races of man / by Sonia Cole.

  • Sonia Mary Cole
Date:
1965
Catalogue details
    52/150 page 47
    White element in their ancestry. A skull from Midland, Texas, has also been dated to between 10,000 and 20,000 years old on the grounds of cultural and faunal associations and its antiquity has been supported by radio-carbon and uranium dating techniques. An ancient skull from Punin in Ecuador appears to be rather different from the modern American Indians and is said to resemble the Australian aborigine. Other skeletons from Lagoa Santa, eastern Brazil, though dominantly of American Indian type, also have certain features reminiscent of the Australoids. In general, the earliest skulls of the New World are relatively long-headed, the later ones are round-headed. The American Indians are believed to be the result of a mixture between archaic White and later Mongoloid immigrants from Asia; the first of these immigrants must have crossed the Bering Straits before the end of the Ice Age, probably by a land bridge which existed when the sea-level was lower. The Food-gathering Stage During most of the Stone Age, for about a million years or so, people must have lived in small, isolated groups. There were distinct tool-making techniques in dif ferent geographical areas, which suggest that the gene flow between these groups was rather limited. Among the Australian aborigines, it was rare to find tribes of more than 500 persons and Bushmen groups consist of 50-100 persons; probably this figure was about the upper limit of groups of prehistoric hunters. Since men at the hunting and food-gathering stage make extensive use of natural resources, it would have been impossible for more than one population to exist in the same territory. These small, isolated groups provided the ideal conditions for promoting rapid evolutionary changes. Within such groups, mutations must have arisen which, even though they may have had no immediate adaptive advantages, would have increased in fre quency by statistical accident. Some of these traits may have been encouraged through what Darwin called sexual selection, that is the selection of certain pre ferred characters in the choice of a mate. Size and strength and 'mature' char acters may have been admired in men (and the strong would have obtained more wives than the weak), while women who remained small and 'unspecialized' were probably favoured. Sexual differences (dimorphism) are very marked in early hominids and also in the Upper Palaeolithic populations of Europe. Among d
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