CANNIBALISM THEORY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21736, 30 August 1932, Page 9

CANNIBALISM THEORY

SKULLS FROM PALESTINE ..''■■■ SCIENTISTS DISAGREE. ' , LONDON, August 17. It was not pure scientific curiosity about what happened in Palestine 7000 years ago which drew a record attendance of scientists to fill the hall at the Royal College of Surgeons last night. The audience expected real fireworks from a resumption of the triangular dispute at the Prehistoric Congress on Thursday, in which Professor Grafton Elliot Smith, Sir Anthony Keith, Conservator of the Museums at the College of Surgeons, and Miss Dorothy Garrod, the archaeologist who has been excavating in Galilee, took part. Expectations were disappointed, however. Even science has its duller moments.

On Thursday Miss Garrod claimed to have discovered remains of a prehistoric race of cannibals in Palestine. She called them Natufians, and said they lived about 5000 B.C.

Sir Arthur supor.ted her views, and said, incidentally, that the shape of the Natufians' noses showed that they might have been the ancestors of the Semitic noses. ■-.•■•• v.-

' Professor Grafton Elliot Smith said that this alleged new race was a "very mixed bag," and observed that the discovery of cannibalism in Palestine would be revolutionary.

' Miss Garrod told him that that was not the time nor the place to discuss such things. Everyone thought it would be the time and the place when Sir Arthur arranged for the exhibition last night at the college of a number of skulls supporting the theory of cannibalism. These show that the Natufians had a habit of boring through the skull _after death, as if to reach the brains. On the cannibalistic theory, these would be a tit-bit, as with certain modern cannibals in Borneo and elsewhere. The skulls also showed that the Natulan' women always had two front teeth knocked out. This had probably nothing to do with cannibalism. '•'.'■ Sir Arthur was unable to attend last night. Mis Garrod lectured and'developed the theory of cannibalism.

Professor Elliot Smith listened intently. The chairman asked him to speak at the close of Miss Garrod's remarks, but he declined with a smile.