From Darwin to Dayton, Tennessee
Men Before Adam. By Anne Terry White. (Robert Hale. t2s. 6d.) "WALK up, Ladies and Gentlemen," wrote Hugh Falcone: when George Busk brought to England in 1862 the skull of a Neanderthal man found at Gibraltar fifteen years before. "Walk up! and see Professor Busk's Grand, Priscan, Pithecoid, Mesocephalous, Prog- nathous, Agrioblematus, Platycnemic, wild Homo calpicus of Gibraltar ! " In the same way one may cry on reading this book, "Walk up Ladies and Gentlemen, and see a pageant of the dis- coveries of early man—the Red Lady of Paviland, the Dawn Man of Piltdown, the Ape-Man of Java, all the missing links, and fakes and frauds, not to mention dragons' bones and diluvial axes ! " But Mrs. White needs no barker ; she has already given us, in her Lost Worlds, a popular account of the high-lights in the history of protohistoric archaeology. In this book, first published a few years ago in America, her theme is the discovery of Pleistocene man, and she writes, not for specialists in archaeology and physical .anthro- pology, but for the ordinary reader. Her style is popular and anecdotal ; she makes the most of the circumstances of each discovery—the interplay of directed research and chance, the ambitions and aims of the main figures in the story, and the disputes and controversies that surrounded each discovery. The book is well illustrated with portraits of nineteenth-century archaeologists, and reproductions of what the Chicago Field Museum of National History and the Smithsonian Institute think Neanderthal Man looked like.
It would be easy to disagree in detail with Mrs. White's findings. Prehistoric archaeology is not the result of Darwinian thought ; there is no mention here of the Danish pioneers who created the three-age system, nor any account of the work of Esper at Gaylen- reuth nor Schmerling near Liége who well preceded MacEnery and Boucher de Perthes ; it is impossible to understand the con- troversies over the authenticity of Mtamira unless one realises that mobiliary Palaeolithic art was known of for many years before— and so forth. But these are criticisms of detail, and every short and readable history of archaeology and physical anthropology must be a ffiatter of selection. Two more serious criticisms lie in the arrangement of the book, and its chronological limits. The treatment is apparently disjointed, moving backwards and forwards among the discoveries of the last hundred years, but Mrs. White may have chosen this as the most palatable of the ways of writing the history of archaeological discovery. A chronological table at the end minimises the danger of confusion. The book seems to stop short at 1927 (though there are entries in the bibliography up to 1939). Our knowledge of man before Adam has been enormously increased in the last twenty-five years, and these increases should have come within the compass of a book first published in this country in 1949. . It is a quarter of a century since the State of Tennessee prosecuted John Scopes for teaching the theory. of evolu- tion, and although Mrs. White has taken the Monkey Trial as her text, our perspeetive of man's past before history has been greatly extended since then.
But to argue that the book should have been better than it is is not to deny that it is, within its limits, interesting and useful. No
such book of comparable- is known to me, though Casson's Discovery of Man and Peniman's Hundred Years of Anthropology exist, of course, for the serious student. The work of vulgarisation is very difficult to do, and this book represents a considerable achievement. Its aim was "to outline a few of the great finds, the story of a few of the great adventures which the men who sought to unravel man's pedigree have experienced." I hope it will be widely read, especially byiany who may still think that Pleistocene Man is a hypothesis, and human palaeontology the search for the missing link. Are there any such still left at Menkeyville, and will William Jennings Bryan stir uneasily in his grave at this attrac- tive popular statement of the early history of man, the primaeval
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