A stalwart old man, anthropologically a typical Alpine—globular head; wide-set eyes; square jaw; deep-set dark brown eyes; blobby, short-tipped, turned-down nose; broad shoulders; short, thick-set body; straight hair—boarded a boat at Seattle last week. He was Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, 63, curator of physical anthropology at the U. S. National Museum, bound for Kodiak Island off the coast of Alaska. There he will grub for the ancient debris which indicates that Mongoloid peoples millenia ago crept across Bering Strait,* down the western coast of the Americas and thence across the mountains and the rest of the Western hemisphere. Four times Dr. Hrdlicka has been North since 1926, always with parties of diggers. This time, he told newsgatherers, "I am going alone, because the economy program cut our [Smithsonian] funds. However, three or four Eastern college boys will join me later at their own expense."
An anthropologist's interest in items human is protean. Neatly arranged cases, cupboards and drawers at the Smithsonian Institution contain 1.500 human skeletal remains which Dr. Hrdlicka has collected. In filing cabinets are his records of American whites and Negroes, of Egyptians and Slavs (he is a Bohemian), of peoples in Peru, Mexico, Asia, of little understood midgets. A small cabinet, labeled tetrapodisis and still only meagrely filled, contains the case histories of children who ambled, like little animals, on hands and feet before they walked upright (TIME, Jan. 6 & Jan. 27, 1930). The "walking-on-all-fours" records form the nucleus of a systematic study of the primordial habits of human infants which Dr. Hrdlicka has begun.
Animal-like behavior is a natural, evanescent phase of human development, Hrdlicka evidence already filed indicates. A certain boy, now an honor student in an Eastern college, as a child had no playmates until he found a lonesome pig in his backyard on a Western farm. Boy and pig played together, wallowed together, grunted to each other understandingly.†
A little boy named David "talked" with all the dogs in his neighborhood, confused their masters by duplicating their individual barkings. From such data Dr. Hrdlicka surmises that "the proficiency with which some primitive people can call and understand wild animals may be a survival of this identification period rather than an entirely acquired art."
Other animal-like manifestations reported by parents: "Grasping objects from the ground with the teeth while walking on all fours, and carrying them in the mouth as cats carry mice or dogs carry balls."
"Holding a nursing bottle with both the fingers and toes while drinking from it. A cat, trained to take milk from a nursing bottle, held it in precisely the same way. This seemed the only natural way for the quadruped."
''One bright girl called Barry would roll on the floor for extended periods like a happy, playing kitten."
One boy could whinny.
"Gloria bit and snapped at people's legs when angered while walking on all fours. A behavior practically identical with that of a puppy."