The most ancient skeletal remains of man / by A. Hrdlička.

  • Alex Hrdlicka
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The most ancient skeletal remains of man / by A. Hrdlička. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Taubach near Weimar, Germany, in 1892, by A. Weiss. The crown of this tooth shows considerable wear and this, with other character- istics of the specimen, created at first an impression that the tooth was perhaps not human. Later, however, the tooth was accepted as proceeding from a human child. Meanwhile one of the laborers at Taubach discovered in equally old deposits a first permanent left lower molar about the human nature of which there can be no question, and this tooth also shows various primitive features. Both these finds have been reported upon and the specimens described by Nehring.^ The permanent molar is preserved in the museum in Jena. Other specimens belonging to this category are the more or less defective lower jaws of La Naulette, Malarnaud, and Sipka. The La Naulette jaw was found in 1866 by Dupont in a cave at La Naulette, Belgium, together with an ulna and a few other fragments of human bones. The find was reported and thebones described by Dupont in the Bulletin de I’Academie Royale Beige, second series, volume 12, 1866, and by Topinard in the Revue d’Anthropologie of the same year. The original specimen is preserved in the Musee Royal d’Histoire Naturelle, Brussels. It is evidently a portion of the lower jaw of a subadult female. It lacks all chin prominence and shows primitive features of the alveoli and hence teeth, such as a broad root of the canine with the central groove on each side, and the very perceptibly increasing size of the sockets of the molars from before backwards. The lower jaw of Malarnaud was discovered in 1889 in a small side chamber of the cave of Malarnaud, near the village of Mont- seron. Arize, France. It lay 2 meters (about 7 feet) deep beneath a layer of stalagmite, in a mass consisting of a great quantity of bones of Quaternary animals and reddish clay. The bone is that of an adolescent, the third molars being still in their sockets. The teeth are missing, with the exception of the first right molar. The jaw is not of great size and is rather low but stout. As the La Naulette specimen, it lacks the chin prominence such as characterizes the lower jaw of modern man.^ The Sipka specimen is a fragment of the lower jaw of a child, probably between the eighth and tenth year of age. It was found in 1880 in the Sipka cave, near Stramberk, Moravia, by Dr. Karel J. Maska, the deserving Moravian explorer. It shows six teeth three incisors, the right canine, and the two right premolars, the iNehring, A. Uber elnen fossilen Menschenzahn aus dem Diluvium von Taubach bei Weimar. (Verb. Berl. G. Anthr., etc., Zeit. Ethn., 1895, pp. 338-340, 425-433.) Same author, Uber elnen Menschllchen Molar aus dem Diluvium von Taubach bei Weimar. (Ibid., pp. 573-577.) See also Adloff, Das Gebiss des Menschen und der Anthropomor- phen., Berlin, 1008 ; Schmidt, R. R., Die dlluvlale Vorzelt Deutschlands, Stuttgart 1912 • and Festschrift Anthropologische Versammlung Weimar, 1912 ' H—Bull, de la Soc. Philomath, de Paris, 1889, and Congrfta Anthrop. Pr6hist., 1889, p. 417.