MAN 63 



tened head, and probably very dull wit. The fossils of 

 Neanderthal man, the earliest dating some 200,000 or more 

 years ago, are so abundant and so widely distributed that 

 some feel that he must have been directly ancestral to mod- 

 ern man. In his latter days he was contemporary with the 

 direct forerunners of Homo sapiens, Cro-Magnon man and 

 others; but he does not seem to have contributed much, if 

 anything, to the general characteristics of present-day man. 



As this brief summary of the record indicates, the anthro- 

 pologist has a considerable body of material to work with. 

 He has long ago definitely determined that man and the 

 anthropoids separated by branching off from a common 

 ancestral line; and, as new fossils are found, he will gradu- 

 ally piece together the evolutionary story. At the present 

 moment all the known fossils, except the Australopithecines 

 of Africa, are relatively near modem man, and most of them 

 will probably be classified eventually in the same genus. 

 Homo. Broom was not far wrong when he declared the 

 South African find to be the greatest of all time. It gives us 

 a picture of the first incipient stages of our rise above the 

 level of the apes, a rise that leads finally to the most unique 

 of all human characteristics, conceptual thought. 



Some will try to use this fossil record of man to promote 

 their own racial prejudices and to establish a multiphcity of 

 racial origins, with the imphcation that there is distinction 

 and superiority involved. Actually, the record at present 

 is insufficient for any purpose involving the study of races. 

 The vexing racial problem must be approached historically 

 and genetically. At the dawn of recorded history we find 

 man distributed widely but thinly over the earth as a poly- 

 typical species. There had been long semi-isolation with 

 modifications in the prehistoric period, but the differences 

 which arose were not profound enough to produce any 

 breakup of the species. 



The incessant cross-breeding between groups, even in 

 early man, has prevented any drift toward an emergent 



