This book is not about the fossil discoveries themselves and thus it does not parallel the obligate litany found in texts in human evolution. Instead it chronicles the often strange (to us) theoretical notions of our mostly anti-Darwinian or pre-Darwinian scientific predecessors. Well-known early paleontologists and anthropologists—Henry Fairfield Osborn, Robert Broom, Arthur Keith, Ernest Hooton, and even Franz Weidenreich in his early years—did not accept natural selection as an important force in human evolution.
What did they think drove human evolution then? The answers differ in each case but as a group they serve to indicate how little Darwinism dominated late 19th and early 20th century anthropology, and how very recently the evolutionary principles discovered in the rest of the organic world were applied to the special case of human beings. Those who hazarded Darwinist "materialist" hypotheses on human origins in this period of time were largely forgotten.
Two such ...
