Prehistoric Man

Published in 1912, this Cambridge Manual captures paleoanthropology at a pivotal moment, just before major discoveries would reshape our understanding of human origins. W. L. H. Duckworth surveys what turn-of-the-century scientists believed about prehistoric humans, from the controversial Pithecanthropus erectus fossils to the enigmatic Mauer jaw. The book traces the precursors to Paleolithic man and concludes at the Aurignacian culture, synthesizing the fragmentary fossil evidence and stone tools that constituted the sum of human knowledge about our deep past. What makes this volume fascinating today is not its scientific accuracy, but its historical value. Duckworth writes with characteristic early-20th-century confidence about classification and geological dating, never imagining the upheavals to come including the Piltdown hoax that would later shame British anthropology. The book reveals how scholars constructed evolutionary trees from tantalizingly incomplete evidence, and where their intuitions happened to be right or spectacularly wrong. For readers curious about the history of science, or anyone who wants to understand how we got from early speculation to modern paleoanthropology, this little manual offers a remarkable window into the past.