George Grant MacCurdy (April 17, 1863 – November 15, 1947) was an American anthropologist, born at Warrensburg, Mo., where he graduated from the State Normal School in 1887, after which he attended Harvard (AB, 1893; AM, 1894); then studied in Europe at Vienna, Paris (School of Anthropology), and at Berlin (1894–1898; and at Yale (PhD, 1905).^[1] He was employed at Yale from 1902 onward as instructor, lecturer, curator of the anthropological collections (1902–1910), and assistant professor of archaeology after 1910.^[2] He was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.^[3]

European hypothesis

MacCurdy argued for Europe as the origin of the first humans, in his 1924 book Human Origins, he said: “The beginnings of things human, so far as we have been able to discover them, have their fullest exemplification in Europe”.^[4] His hypothesis was disproven in the late-mid-20th century, when hundreds of fossils found in East Africa evidenced the region as the cradle of humankind.^[5][6]

Works

He was the author of:

• Obsidian razor of the Aztecs (1900)
• The Eolithic Problem (1905)
• Some Phases of Prehistoric Archœology (1907)
• Recent Discoveries Bearing on the Antiquity of Man in Europe. (1910)
• A Study of Chiriquian Antiquities (1911)
• Review of Mayan Art (1913)
• Human Skulls from Gazelle Peninsula (1914)
• Human Origins (1924)
• The Coming of Man, USA: The University Society, 1935 , retrieved 10 October 2011

References

External links

• Works by or about George Grant MacCurdy at Wikisource

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