The Black Death: a biological reappraisal
نویسنده
چکیده
The early chapters, beginning with the ubiquitous Bishop Ussher, are largely synoptic. In later ones, Grayson resorts to a finer-resolution microscope. He rounds his sights on the crucial 1810-60 period-bounded by Cuvier's announcement of fossil "time markers", and Boucher de Perthes's forging of a common geo-archaeological context for fixing mankind's antediluvial age. The book comes alive with Grayson's discussion of cave palaeontology, and his technical mastery is evident in his treatment of the vexed question of man's contemporaneity with the mammoth (the book's leitmotif). His informed account illustrates just how complex the interpretation of cave fossils really was. Cuvier dismissed the Gailenreuth cave humans, Frere's stone implements, Guadeloupe man, and Scholtheim's human-rhino cavern assortment; Lyell and Buckland redated Schmerling's "Ethiopian" Engis skull (causing a loss of popular interest which forced Schmerling to remainder his Researches as wrapping-paper!); even Darwin rubbished Boucher's book. The volte-face occurred during that extraordinary period when Pengelly's Brixham Cave findings in 1858 sent specialists scurrying across the Channel to re-examine Boucher's Abb6ville site. Here, one senses that a contextual study of the Falconer-Prestwich group which invaded France and turned the chronological tables would provide welcome light on why specialists now had little trouble accepting what was anathema to older savants, a human antiquity measured in tens of millennia. This, of course, wasn't Grayson's brief, but it would help to underscore the data-based "resolution" of the antiquity debate that he has so well documented.
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ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Medical History
دوره 29 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 1985