The Neanderthal skull : its peculiar conformation explained anatomically / by Joseph Barnard Davis.

  • Davis, Joseph Barnard, 1801-1881.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Neanderthal skull : its peculiar conformation explained anatomically / by Joseph Barnard Davis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    POSTSCRIPT. Since what precedes was written, I have had an opportunity to examine the osteological collection of the celebrated and accu- rate Soemmerring, which is preserved in the Anatomical Museum of the University of Giessen. His attention has evidently been specially directed to anomalies of structure, as well as to morbid changes. He distinctly noticed the varieties in the sutures of the skull, as other anatomists have done, and the effects they pro- duce in altering its form. One section of his Catalogue is en- titled “ Suturarum cranii varietates.” In this Section he enu- merates “ 148. Cranium puellae venustissimse Parisinse viginti sex annorum. Sutura sagittalis obliterata,” and adds, “ hinc forma elongata.” (Catalogus Musei Anatomici quod eollegit Samuel Thomas de Soemmerring. 1830, p. 124.) Professor G. S. Morton fully recognized the effects of prema- ture obliteration of the cranial sutures. In a communication to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, made May 6, 1845, he exhibited the skull of a Congo Negro (No. 1224 of his * Catalogue ’), “ who could not have been more than twenty years old; and yet,” he says, “ there is a total absence of the sagittal and coronal sutures, and the lambdoidal itself is not complete, while the temporal suture remains entirely open.” After calling atten- tion to a skull exhibited by him in 1841, nearly in all respects analogous, and the opinion he had deduced from it, that the principal function of the sutures is to subserve the growth of the bones (he might have added, and of the brain also), which they do by osseous deposition at their margins, he concluded by showing “ that, owing to the total absence of the .sagittal suture in the Congo Negro skull, the lateral growth of the cranium has ceased at an early period of life; the presence of the lambdoidal suture has permitted of posterior elongation, and, the squamous sutures being entirely open, the upward growth, corresponding to the lines of these sutures, is remarkably developed.” (Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. Philad. vol. i., August 1841, and vol. ii., May 1845, p. 232; * Types of Mankind,’ 1854, p. 303.)