Fresh-water shell mounds of the St. John's River, Florida / by Jeffries Wyman.
- Jeffries Wyman
- Date:
- 1875
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Fresh-water shell mounds of the St. John's River, Florida / by Jeffries Wyman. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![complete than elsewhere.74 A tibia from the River Ronge Mound, and now in the Peabody Museum, is figured on Plate IV, fig 7, of one-quarter size. The extreme length of this tibia is 15-6 inches. A section of the same is given on Plate IX, fig 23. In some cases there is, in addition to the flattening, a rounding of the angles of the bone, so that the transverse section becomes more or less oval, as will be seen by reference to the figures in Plate IX, but this is not frequent. It will be observed, however, that both the peculiarities exist in very different degrees, as the several sections given on the plate show. As far as our own observations go, the flattening of the tibia cannot be considered as forming a race character among the Indians. After examining large collections of tibiae we do not find that marked flattening exists in more than about thirty per cent, of the cases examined. On Plate IX we give sections of eight tibiae taken from recent skeletons of the white race, figs. 1-8, and fifteen taken from ancient bones of North American Indians, including the Moundbuilders. Of these fig. 9 is from an Indian grave in Haverhill, Mass.; fig. 10 is from a mound in East Tennessee; fig. 11 is from a mound in Kentucky; figs. 12 and 13 are from a mound at Cedar Keys, East Florida; fig. 13a is a section cut three and one-half inches lower down, but from the same tibia as fig. 13 ; fig. 14 is from a mound on the St. John’s River, Fla. ; figs. 15-22 are from tibiae found in various places in Florida; and fig. 23 is from the River Rouge Mound in Michigan. Attention has been called by different observers to these two deviations from the normal form, on account of the existence of somewhat similar pecu- liarities in the apes. The transverse section of the tibia in the Chimpanzee, Gorilla and Orang, shows that it is flatter from side to side than is usual in man, and that its angles are more rounded, and consequently that its sec- tion approaches an oval form. The flattening, however, in the instances we have examined, does not reduce the transverse to less than 0-57 of the fore and aft diameter, while in the tibia from River Rouge Mound, already re- ferred to, it is only 0*48. On the other hand, among the white race the flattening is occasionally as great as in the Gorilla, or the Chimpanzee. It is not the flattening c5f the human tibia so much as the rounding of its angles and the bending of the shaft forwards which gives it its ape-like features, consequently the sharp edged, or *sabre-shaped” tibia from Cro- Magnon, and the tibia from the River Rouge Mound, which are character- ized simply by flattening, are not, strictly speaking, ape-like. The markings on the surface which are peculiar to, and characteristic of, the human tibia* viz., where the interosseous ligament and the popliteal muscles are attached, however great the flattening or the rounding may be, remain unchanged. Other characteristics of the human tibia are equally persistent, and we have not seen a single instance in which an anatomist 71 See Fourth and Sixth Annual Reports of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Etb. nology; 1871, p. 21; 1873, p. 13. [Mr. Gillman has since published extended accounts of the tibiae found in the Michigan mounds. See the Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1873, and the American Naturalist for 1875. Ed.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22326881_0078.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
