ANT210H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Grafton Elliot Smith, Nekhen, Piltdown Man
Document Summary
160 feet), the equivalent of a modern nearly fifteen-story building: the amphitheater"s three tiers of seating could accommodate an audience of upward of 50,000 people, about the capacity of many modern major league baseball stadiums. Smith"s intellectual legacy will, perhaps, forever be tainted by his association with the piltdown man hoax. You will remember that, though almost certainly not materially involved in perpetrating the fraud, he became one of the false fossil"s strongest proponents. Of course, smith understood that humanity had, nevertheless, under- gone vast cultural changes since human beings first burst onto the scene. For smith, the single genius culture, the source of all human cultural development, was ancient egypt. In his view, before 6,000 years ago, people all over the world were living in a natural, primitive, and more or less fixed state. In the diffusionist view, these cultural inventions spread like ripples on a still pond, emanating from egypt and moving across the face of the earth.
