Biggest Head

Despite the dogged conviction of the late, high-domed Publicist Arthur Brisbane that high-domed foreheads are a mark of superior intelligence, a mass of evidence has been assembled by scientists to show that, so far as living members of the species Homo sapiens are concerned, no connection can be traced between intellectual ability and the size or shape of the skull. Eskimos have bigger heads than civilized whites but no one argues that they are any smarter. Nevertheless it is a fact that the skull size of man in general has increased with progress up the evolutionary scale, and anthropologists are greatly interested in the normal range of variation in cranial capacity.* Present average is 1,450 cubic centimetres; but a person may have an interior head size several hundred cc. above or below that figure and still not be abnormal.

The Smithsonian Institution's tireless Ales Hrdlicka recently caused an anthropological stir by discovering in the Aleutian Islands the skull of an Aleut which had a capacity of 2,005 cc. (TIME, Oct. 12). This was the largest on record in the Western Hemisphere, the largest anywhere except for one huge, famed Russian head: that of Novelist Ivan Turgenev which was measured at 2,030 cc. Last week a fragmentary skull found in Virginia and assembled at the Smithsonian outstripped even Turgenev's by an amazing margin, took indisputable first rank as the biggest head ever to pass under the scrutiny of science.

Finder was Judge William Johnson Graham of the U. S. Court of Customs & Patent Appeals, an experienced amateur archeologist who was probing the remains of the old Algonquin village of Patowoameke, from which the Potomac derives its name. When the skull fragments of the old Indian; perhaps a contemporary of John Smith and Pocahontas, were fitted together. Judge Graham gasped in astonishment: "Why, it's as big as a watermelon!" This was only mild hyperbole. The unknown Algonquin's cranial capacity was measured at 2,200 cc.

*Skulls deformed by giantism, hydrocephaly, microcephaly, etc. are of course not in the normal range.

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