The Paleolinguist Bulletin
Summer 2023
(BERLIN) -- Predating the famed Dusseldorf cave discovery by eight years, a skull found on Gibraltar led to more robust activity on the narrow coastal peninsula, part of which was undertaken by Dorothy Garrod. The following is a brief introduction of the archaeologist. Included was a photo not currently found in online catalogs; according to at least one primary source from the mid 1920s, Miss Garrod did not like to be photographed.
Liverpool Post and Mercury, 03 June 1931, Page 6.
NEWS, NOTES AND QUERIES
She took up the study of archaeology, becoming one of the leading authorities on paleontology. It was she, who, in 1926, discovered in a cave at Gibraltar, the Mousterian skull which is held to be at least 20,000 years old.
Western Mail, Cardiff, South Glamorgan, Wales, 06 August 1926, Page 7.
A WOMAN'S DISCOVERY
SKULL UNEARTHED AT GIBRALTAR.
The skull of a child who died at least 300 centuries ago lay on one table in a lecture room. Behind it stood Miss Dorothy Garrod, a young and pretty woman, who told the British Association how she had used
dynamite in unearthing the skull at Devil's Tower, Gibraltar. After Miss Garrod had sat down Sir Arthur Keith, the great authority on ancient Man, congratulated her on finding the first complete representative skull of a Neanderthal child.
Miss Garrod said that on the Devil's Tower site she found bones of panthers, hyenas, deer, rabbits, and elephants. She had to use dynamite to blow up the hard strata of rock, and in one of the slabs of stone which were displaced she saw the skull buried.
She brought the skull, still in the stone, back to Oxford, and there the skull was carefully taken out.
Professor Boyd Dawkins told the assembly that the skull was so old that no one could really fix a time limit for it.
Sir Arthur Keith said the people who inhabited Europe during the Neanderthal Age were as different from modern people as white men were from black.
They could not raise themselves into an erect posture. The skull found by Miss Garrod was that of a boy aged about eight or ten.
The Post-Crescent, Appleton, Wisconsin, 09 October 1926, Page 32.
FIND SKULL ABOUT 20,000 YEARS OLD
Gibraltar—(AP)—Misss D. A. E Garod, a student of the Institute de Paleontologie Humaine, Paris, who has been excavating here, has made an important discovery of portions of a human skull belonging to a young person.
The flnd was embedded in hard tufa with typical Mousterian implements.
The skull is of the same age and type as the celebrated "Gibraltar skull" discovered at Forbes Quarry in the eighteen forties and now at the College of Surgeons Museum, and according to a conservative estimate it is probably not less than 20,000 years old.
The Daily Mail, 26 September 1927, Page 4.
Miss Dorothy Garrod, daughter of Sir Archibald Garrod, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, has been awarded the Prix Hollandais by the (...) national Institute of Anthropology for the best work in physical anthropology or pre-history.
..
North Mail and Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 22 October 1927, Page 7.
ANTHROPOLOGY EXPERT
Important Appointment for Englishwoman.
PARIS, Friday.
Miss Dorothy Garrod. daughter of Sir Archibald Garrod, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, has been appointed the English member of the Committee of the International Anthropological Institute, which will seek to discover whether the remains found at Glozel are relics of the Stone Age or objects deposited there in comparatively recent times as a hoax.
Miss Garrod is an expert in anthropology, and this year was awarded the Prix Hollandais, worth L600 (pounds), for her investigations.
In June last year she discovered a pre-historic skull. between 10,000 and 20,000 years old, embedded in the rocks at Gibraltar.—Central News.
North Mail and Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 15 November 1927, Page 6, Column 4.
MAN'S EARLY DAYS
A Primitive Skull Revives An Old Quarrel.
(BY PORCELLA.)
About primitive man, modern science knows very little. Much less indeed than the camp followers of science pretend. But it is learning steadily. The recent discovery at Gibraltar of a Neanderthal infant skull with a high forehead may teach several surprise lessons.
ALL the professors, including the anatomists, the ethnologists and the biologists, were greatly excited when they heard that Miss Dorothy Garrod, in the spring of 1926, had unearthed a portion of a very ancient skull when excavating a cave at the Devil's Tower, Gibraltar. That rocky corner of Spain was already famous to connoisseurs in early human remains, for in 1848 Lieutenant Flint discovered a par-ticularly strange specimen near Forbes Quarry.
A November meeting of the Royal Anthropo-logical Institute has been devoted to Miss Garrod's discovery.
Both these Gibraltar finds belong to the type which is called Neanderthal Man, because the first published description of such a skull referred to a discovery in 1856 in a cave at Neanderthal, near Dusseldorf.
Furious controversies have raged around these forlorn remains of early humans. Long ago Huxley wrote: 'It was suggested that the Neanderthal skeleton was that of a stray idiot; that the characters of the skull were the result of early synostosis or of late gout; and in fact. any stick was good enough to beat the dog withal." Of late the general trend of scientific opinion has been to regard this type of man as a great great uncle, many times removed, of all living races, an obsolete side-branch of the human family tree. One of the most distinct peculiarities of the type was the small development of the parts of the brain called the prefrontal and parietal areas. Relying largely on these characteristics, anatomists. such as Prof. G. Elliot Smith, had assigned ouly a collateral connection with our genealogy to this early man.
Miss Garrod's discovery, blasted out of the hard travertine with the aid of dynamite has fallen upon the world of science like a bombshell. The remains of this five-year-old boy of long ago belong undoubtedly to one of the Neanderthal type, an indicated by the massive jaw, the peculiar teeth, and other characteristics. But in the words of Professor Elliot Smith himself:
"The Devil's Tower skull differs from the rest (of the Neanderthal crania) in an exceptional expansion of those areas of the brain which confer upon Homo Sapiens (i.e.. modern man) his most distinctive attribute. . . . It is definitely Neanderthaloid, and must have acquired its peculiar cerebral
characters independently of
Homo Sapiens by convergent development "
This is a remarkable statement in view of the status of its author. Miss Garrod's find seems likely to become a bone of fierce contention. Is Neanderthal man after all the direct ancestor of at least some of us here present?
The Liverpool Post and Mercury article included another discovery:
MISS DOROTHY GARROD, who has announced an important archaeological discovery in Palestine, is at present there as head of a party of women scientists engaged on excavation work.
The Daily Telegraph, 05 February 1934, Page 14
Another photo of Miss Garrod accompanied by
Mrs. Christopher Hawkes, from the Mount Carmel expedition.
In 1934, The Wichita Eagle gave an account of other women engaged not to some duke or lord, but in archaeology:
THEY CAN TAKE IT
Members of such professions as civil engineering and archaeology once thought they couldn't marry because their work called them to the far corners of the earth and the life was too rugged for women. But now women are going everywhere that men go. A list of Englishwomen engaged in archaeology is most im-pressive.
Mrs. Agnes Horsfleld is working in the Transjordan under armed guard, Miss Gertrude Caton-Thompson, protected by a company of Bedouins, is combing the Libyan desert. Miss Dorothy Garrod is digging with the Arabs in the caves on Mount Carmel. Miss Winifred Lamb has uncovered five towns in the Island of Mitylene, Lesbos. Palestine and vicinity have attracted Lady Petrie, Mrs. Leonard Wooley, Miss Margaret Murray, Miss Kathleen Kenyon and others.
The Wichita Evening Eagle,
25 May 1934, Page 4, Column 1.
Editor-in-Chief: Victor Murdock
James C. L'Angelle Undergraduate Research University of Nevada, Reno
