Word: hrdlicka
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Then the many differences among human groups will appear only as mutations within a single species. "Race" might perhaps have been redefined, he conceded, but Nazis and others have abused the term until it can only be chucked out for good. Snorted the Smithsonian Institution's famed Ales Hrdlicka: "If all the anthropologists agreed with Montagu and dropped the word race from their vocabulary today, he would be back tomorrow with a claim that it was a good word and try to get it reinstated...
...another point Ashley-Montagu and Hrdlicka presented divergent evidence to reach an important agreement: Hrdlicka declared the evidence from old bones and pots is now conclusive that the long-disputed theory that the American Indians came from Asia via Bering Strait is indeed correct. Ashley-Montagu added evidence of a new sort: analysis of blood types...
...Scattered fossils of individuals-notably the famed "Minnesota Maid" who apparently fell or was thrown into a Glacial Period lake -have been dated as having lived 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. But even this modest antiquity has been denied by the Smithsonian Institution's doughty Ales Hrdlicka. Until recently the earliest known American "culture" was that of mysterious Folsom Man, whose first tools and campsites were encountered near Folsom, N. Mex. No remains of the man himself were found...
Geological evidence indicates that a Folsom campsite in Colorado may be as much as 25,000 years old. After Folsom Man there is a long gap to the remains of Siberian immigrants, perhaps 4,000 or 5,000 years old, found by Hrdlicka in Alaska. Then come the "Basket-Makers" who lived in the southwestern U. S. about 15 centuries B. C. and who preceded the Indians whom white invaders found...
...Hrdlicka was still not ready to give up. "It's a delusion," exclaimed he. "It does not amount to a scientific demonstration. There are many things that look like [sic] and many things that do not look like, but there is no proof. The geology of the earth is not like writing or even hieroglyphics -it is vague and indecisive. ... I have stopped arguing." He was willing to concede man in North America 7,000 or 8,000 years-perhaps even 10,000-but no more...