"Knowledge is inherent in all things. The World is a library..." Chief Luther Standing Bear Ogala Sioux The 1984 work “Modern Human Origins: A World Survey of the Fossil Evidence” edited by Fred Smith and Frank Spencer, was pivotable... more
"Knowledge is inherent in all things. The World is a library..." Chief Luther Standing Bear Ogala Sioux
The 1984 work “Modern Human Origins: A World Survey of the Fossil Evidence” edited by Fred Smith and Frank Spencer, was pivotable and laid the foundation of this work, an oversight of the multiple-theories contending to make ends-meet. A quote from this pivotal work sets a tone, both figuratively and literally for the direction of this book.
A major problem confronting late 19th century human evolutionists was the incipient argument for the relative stability of the human form. From accumulating skeletal evidence it appeared as if the modern human skeleton extended far back in time, an apparent fact which led many workers to either abandon or modify their views on human evolution. One such apostate was Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913). In 1887, Wallace examined the evidence for early “early man” in the New World, and, like the German anatomist Julian Kollman (1834-1918) who three years earlier had made a similar survey, found not only considerable evidence of antiquity from the available specimens, but also, a continuity of type through time. In an effort to explain this, Wallace [1889, pp 454-461] suggested that once man had become morphologically differentiated from his apish kin (during the mid-Tertiary period), he had remained physically stable (Frank Spencer 1984 pg. 7).
