Word: hrdlicka
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...last fortnight, the conductor and passengers of the westbound train from Irkutsk to Moscow gaped in astonishment at the queer old gentleman who sat with a mouldy, grinning skull in his lap. But Anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka smiled benignly back. For he had just been presented with the most precious skull of his career, and he was literally not going to let it out of his clutches...
...Hrdlicka has long maintained that the ancestors of American Indians were Mongolians who crossed from Asia to Alaska over a land bridge some 15,000 years ago. That bridge has since crumbled away, leaving only the stepping-stones of the smoky Aleutian Islands. During ten summers Dr. Hrdlicka has rummaged around the islands, looking for traces of Mongolian wanderers. First great evidence for his theory turned up in 1931, when, on the island of Kodiak, he discovered a nest of long-headed skulls remarkably similar to those of Algonquin Indians. Since the longheads bore no resemblance to the roundheaded Eskimos...
...thousands of miles farther east than any Neanderthal remains hitherto discovered. Since Soviet science is more notable for enthusiasm than for scholarly caution, some skeptics might have wondered whether the skeleton was really a Neanderthal child or just the luckless progeny of some more recent Mongol wanderer. Dr. Hrdlicka, however, pronounced it a genuine Neanderthal specimen, left no doubt that was one of the most precious childr in anthropology's bare nursery. Dr. Hrdlicka knows...
...body bones are badly crushed and the back of the skull is bashed in, but the skull is otherwise in excellent shape, the jaws and teeth almost complete. Said Dr. Hrdlicka: "We had been hoping, but hardly daring to hope, for some such discovery, and now this young Soviet archeologist has done it. It shows that Neanderthal Man was widely spread over the Old World. For the first time it gives us evidence of a culture extending clear across Europe to the Far East...
...seems likely that, before becoming extinct, Neanderthal Man interbred with the more highly evolved men who supplanted and sometimes ate him. Dr. Hrdlicka thinks that many living people have Neanderthal blood in their veins (or more precisely, Neanderthal genes in their germ plasm), points to suspiciously Neanderthaloid features which crop out in 20th Century humans...