Word: skull
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...proved to be the occipital (posterior) bone of a human skull, and its position in a stratum containing crude flint hand axes and the bones of long-extinct animals made it exciting news in anthropological circles. Marston soon found a second bone (left parietal) which fitted the first bone perfectly. The two bones were enough to give some idea of an extremely ancient kind of man who lived along the Thames about 250,000 years ago, before the last of the great glaciers crept over England...
Last July came a change of luck. Son John found a right parietal skull bone. It fitted precisely the two bones found by Marston, and proved that "the first Englishman" (probably a young woman) had an essentially modern brain. A wave of excitement brought hordes of diggers to Barnfield Pit. But still almost nothing was known about how the first Englishmen lived...
Special treatment was given to three, notably the most hideously bitten victim of all: Golam Khazayi, a boy of six, who had bites on the head too numerous to count. The wolf's massive jaws had chomped right through his skull, and the teeth, piercing the dura mater (parchment-like covering) had dripped rabies virus directly into the brain. Golam already had contracted meningitis through the head wounds. He got penicillin as well as a special course of serum every two days, plus vaccine...
...cases the physical had come first, the researchers found, and had been aggravated by the mental. But in almost as many cases psychic disturbances had led to behavior that produced physical injury, e.g., the passive-aggressive man who wrecked his car and suffered a fractured skull. If this had been his first accident, it might have been chance, but it was his fifth major accident by the age of 22. In at least six cases there was a nervous disorder producing all the signs of bodily illness-except that when the surgeons checked, they could find nothing wrong to operate...
...joyful terror . . . Black bilge water, floating dirt and oil and fish scales had spurted through the [boat's] gratings, and into this we slid." "Harry wore [an old cavalry] sabre, but not before I had nearly killed him with it by a blow which might have split his skull...