RECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE 139 



by G. G. Maccurdy of Yale. The mandible was found at 

 Ehringsdorf, near Weimar, a locality long famous for relics of 

 ancient man, and the bone is now in the Weimar Museum. The 

 jaw adds somewhat to our meagre knowledge of the range of 

 variation in Homo neandertalensis. The left ascending ramus 

 and the upper half of the right ascending ramus are missing, 

 but the lower portion of the jaw is nearly perfect, all the teeth 

 except the two right incisors being present. The absence of a 

 chin-prominence is a marked characteristic, and the inner surface 

 of the anterior wall is very sloping (a point of resemblance to 

 the Heidelberg jaw), but on the other hand the third molars are 

 remarkably small. From the stratum in which the fossil was 

 found, one must infer that the owner of the jaw lived in the 

 early part of the third interglacial epoch, and he was no doubt 

 of Mousterian culture. Schwalbe proposes that the new specimen 

 should be known to science as the " Weimar Jaw." 



Among the other papers in the same number of the American 

 Anthropologist, two deserve special notice. F. H. Sterns, of 

 Harvard, writes an article on " A Stratification of Cultures in 

 Eastern Nebraska." A succession of aboriginal cultures is not 

 often discoverable in America, but Sterns describes a sequence 

 of three cultures, all prehistoric, which he was able to make out 

 at a certain spot (which he calls the " Walter Gilmore site") in 

 the Missouri Valley, in Cass County, Nebraska. He thinks, 

 however, that the entire succession of types may have occupied 

 less than one thousand years. Another interesting essay is 

 one by Elsie Clews Parsons on "Links between Religion and 

 Morality in Early Cultures." The article (which is evidently 

 written from the Rationalistic standpoint) aims at controverting 

 the idea that a connection between supernaturalism and morality 

 is "a late cultural fact," and strong evidence is adduced that 

 such a connection does exist among modern savages, with the 

 proviso, however, that the ethical code of savages is not the 

 code of white men. One must protest against the use here of 

 the words "early" and "primitive" as descriptive of modern 

 savages. Living barbarians differ much from one another ; and 

 although no doubt their respective cultures all resemble in 

 certain negative features the state of life in which primitive 

 H. sapiens found himself, and in these same negative points 

 (such as the absence of spectroscopes and Zeppelin air-ships) 

 differ from the so-called civilised nations, yet savages have 



