Word: pithecanthropus
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...Harvard experience is somewhat different from what he anticipated. His companions at the graduate dormitory "Comus Hall" are hardly your typical students. Comus houses Voltears, a graduate student in French literature who suffers from a sort of agoraphobia, a gay man ("the Gainsborough boy") and his weekend roomate nicknamed Pithecanthropus, and a host of other eccentrics...
...After reading "The Age of Man" [Aug. 29], I happened to pick up G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man and read his perceptive comment on another famous reconstruction by paleontologists -Pithecanthropus. Every word of it could be applied to Ramapithecus and the Yale investigators who have reconstructed him from "no more than partial jawbones and a few teeth...
...bestial ancestors, if they were his ancestors . . . But the effect on popular science was to produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details of hair and habits. He was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon . . . A detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all numbered. No uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a thighbone...
...more than one thousand nine hundred and twenty years of A.D., and five thousand years of B.C., through all of the years and years of the Jewish calendar . . . before Hector was a pup, through the Neolithic and Paleolithic ages, back through and before the Darwin man, the Dover man, Pithecanthropus Erectus, and all of the fathers of the fathers...
Goddard edited the Hearst supplement according to his conviction that readers' tastes were not much above Pithecanthropus level: "The habits of savagery have been welded into the mind and body of man for ten thousand centuries, while it is only sixty centuries that he has had more or less leisure and opportunity to develop the finer things of life." Asking himself what a literate Neanderthal might enjoy, Goddard answered the question every Sunday, with stories about sex ("The Outrageous French Bathing Suits"), sex cum science ("Science Explains Why Chorus Girls Are Suffering from a Love Famine"), sex cum violence...