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Is Prehistory Practical?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2015

V. Gordon Childe
V. Gordon Childe*
Affiliation:
Edinburgh University
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Extract

In 1933 it can hardly be alleged that Prehistory is a useless study, wholely remote from and irrelevant to practical life. In one great country at least, interpretations of supposed facts of Prehistory, imperfectly apprehended by an untrained mind of undoubted genius, have revolutionized the whole structure of society. No one who has read Mein Kampf, or even the extracts therefrom in The Times, can fail to appreciate the profound effect which theories of the racial superiority of ‘Aryans’ have exercised on contemporary Germany. In the name of these theories men are being exiled from public life and shut up in concentration camps, books are being burned and expression of opinions stifled just as, in the name of religious ideas, they were during fifteen long centuries of darkness.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 7 , Issue 28 , December 1933 , pp. 410 - 418
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1933

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References

1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, last ed., S.V. HEREDITY.

2 See Simar, T.,Étude critique de la doctrine des races au xvmme siècle et son expansion au xIxme (Brussels, 1922).Google Scholar

3 To be distinguished from eugenics in so far as the latter aims at weeding out specific hereditary defects and pathological conditions which can be readily and accurately diagnosed, and the heredity of which can be precisely determined since the defects in question are dependent on single genes

4 Prof. Macdougall’s rats, the most recent experimental supports of Lamarckianism, seemed less convincing after a statistical study by Prof. Crew at the British Association meeting in 1933.

5 See Hogben, , 1931, p.126;Google Scholar Ruggles–Gates, cf. p.295. ‘There is no such thing as a pure or homozygous race of mankind’Google Scholar

6 Morgan, Theory of the Gene, Yale, 1928;Google ScholarPubMedsummaries in Ruggles–Gates and in Baur–Fischer-Lenz.

7 Baur, p. 67 : –Difference in the shape of the skull, the structure of the brain … in a word the numberless morphological and physiological distinctions between the various races of man depend in each case upon very numerous heredity-factors, with the result that as yet we how little about the course of their inheritance—. Fischer, pp. 119 and 151, and Ruggles-Gates, pp. 42 and 323, point out the alterations in skuilform and stature produced by non-hereditary post-natal factors. Such alterations cannot be distinguished from hereditary traits in individual cases, though in large populations they might be discounted statistically.

8 Annals of Eugenics, 1926, 1, 405.Google Scholar

9 cf.JRAI., 61, 342 n. 3.Google Scholar

10 Cambridge Ancient History, vol.1 (2nd ed.,1924),preface to 1st ed., page v.Google Scholar