Prehistoric manDuckworth, W. L. H. (Wynfrid Laurence Henry)
History
Prehistoric man
Duckworth, W. L. H. (Wynfrid Laurence Henry)
Prehistoric peoples
The skeleton lay in a horizontal position, but no evidence of an
interment has been adduced. The bones were less than a metre below the
present surface, and in a fine mud-like deposit, apparently ancient, and
of a river-bed type. Implements were also found, and are referred
unhesitatingly to the same horizon as the bones. The Mousterian period is
thus indicated, but no absolutely distinctive implements were found. The
general stratigraphical conditions are considered to assign the deposit
to the base of what is termed the 'inferior Mousterian' level.
(B) The 'sub-boulder-clay' skeleton, discovered near Ipswich in 1911, was
in an extraordinarily contracted attitude. Many parts are absent or
imperfect, owing to the solvent action of the surroundings, but what
remains is sufficient to reveal several features of importance (cf. fig.
29).
Save in one respect, the skeleton is not essentially different from those
of the existing representatives of humanity. The exception is provided by
the shin-bone. That of the right limb has been preserved, and it presents
an anomaly unique in degree, if not in kind, viz.: the substitution of a
rounded for a sharp or keel-like edge to the front of the bone. It can
hardly be other than an individual peculiarity, though the Spy tibia (No.
1) suggests (by its sectional contour) the same conformation.
So far as the skeleton is concerned, even having regard to the anomaly
just mentioned, there is no good reason for assigning the Ipswich
specimen to a separate racial type.
Its interest depends largely upon the circumstances of its surroundings.
It was placed beneath about four feet of 'boulder-clay,' embedded partly
in this and, to a much smaller extent, in the underlying middle-glacial
sand which the bones just entered.
There is some evidence that the surface on which the bones lay was at one
time exposed as an old 'land-surface.' A thin band of carbonised
vegetable matter (not far beneath the bones) contains the remains of land
plants. On this surface the individual whose remains have been preserved
is supposed to have met with his end, and to have been overwhelmed in a
sand drift. The latter it must be supposed was then removed, to be
replaced by the boulder-clay.
Several alternatives to this rather problematical interpretation could be
suggested. The most obvious of these is that we have to deal here with a
neolithic interment, in a grave of which the floor just reached the
middle-glacial sand of the locality. If we enquire what assumptions are
requisite for the adoption of this particular alternative, we shall find,
I think, that they are not very different in degree from those which are
entailed by the supposition that the skeleton is really that of
'sub-boulder-clay' man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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