Theodore Doney McCown

Theodore Doney McCown BA
Born	1908
Died	1969
Residence	Royal College of Surgeons, Lincolns Inn Fields, WC2 Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, Calif. USA [1937]
Occupation	paleoanthropologist academic medical
Society Membership membership ordinary fellow left 1969 deceased elected_AI 1933.11.24 societies Royal College of Surgeons

Notes

House Notes

1933.10.13 proposed by A. Keith, seconded by M.L. Tildesley

A63 had McCowan

1969.10 death noted

Notes From Elsewhere

Theodore Doney McCown (born June 18, 1908 in Macomb , Illinois , died August 17, 1969 ) was an American palaeoanthropologist and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley . He became internationally known in the 1930s in specialist circles due to his excavations in the area of ​​the Karmel Mountains in today's Israel . Among his most important finds are the fossils of Skhul , which today are attributed to the early anatomically modern man . McCown also wrote the first detailed description of finds from the Tabun cave , now classified as Neandertals . In the 1950s and 1960s he dealt, among other things, with the interpretation of findings of the genus Homo from India .
Theodore McCown grew up in Berkeley in 1914, since his father had been appointed director of the Pacific School of Religion . After the father became the director of the Palestine Exploration Fund , the family lived for several years in Palestine in the 1920s. The presence in excavations aroused Ted McCown's interest in archaeological research, so he studied anthropology in Berkeley from 1926, where he graduated in 1929 with a bachelor's degree. In the following two years, he took part in extensive archaeological excursions in France, Spain, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. He also worked as an assistant to the Yale-American School of Oriental Research on excavations in Gerasa in today's Jordan .

The Fossil Skhul V, side view (copy)
In 1931 McCown was admitted to the graduate program at Yale University . After that he was responsible for the planning and execution of the excavations in the Karmel Mountains in today's Israel , until the middle of 1932, whose overall management was Dorothy Garrod . During this time, he was also in contact with the Antiques Authority, which was then responsible for the territory of the League of Nations for Palestine ; The result of these negotiations was that the homine fossils discovered in caves of the Karmel Mountains were exported to the United Kingdom for thorough scientific investigation and were kept at the Royal College of Surgeons .
He spent the academic year 1932/33 in Berkeley. He then went to London , where, until 1937, he and Arthur Keith uncovered the fossils called Mount Carmel Neanderthals , first from their embedding in limestone - breccia , describing them in detail and making reconstructions. The 1939 publication of these investigations was already described by Ashley Montagu in 1940 as "exemplary" [1] and in the obituary of Berkeley University on Theodore McCown as a "classic of the archaeological interpretation". [2] This publication, published as the second part of the book The Stone Age of Mount Carmel , prompted an ongoing discourse on the neanderthal's proximity to the modern man (Homo sapiens) : McCown had pointed out that the findings from the Tabun -cave were more "neanderthaloid" (similar to the Neanderthals), the findings of Skhul were more like the Cro-Magnon humans .
In June 1938, McCown became a lecturer at the Institute of Anthropology at Berkeley University, before he completed his PhD . The doctorate followed in 1940; It was based on the investigation of fossil skull bones from the Carmel Mountains [3] in the working group of Alfred Kroeber . After that, he spent a year studying in Peru, where he was involved in excavation work in the area of ​​preinca settlements in Huamachuco and Cajabamba . [4] From 1942 to 1945 McCown performed his military service as a medical forensic in the San Francisco Presidio ; His duties included, in particular, the identification of killed soldiers of the Second World War .
From 1946, McCown was an associate professor in Berkeley. 1951 followed the appointment to the full professor; This professorship he held in Berkeley until his death. He traveled to the Narmada Valley in India in 1958 and 1964/65, where he co-operated with Indian colleagues. Outside of professional circles McCown was known in the USA by his activity as forensics. He was involved, among other things, in the exhumation and identification of the corpse of Juan Bautista de Anza in Arizpe ( state of Sonora in Mexico ), the founder of San Francisco ; He also led the exhumation of Junípero Serra in Carmel-by-the-Sea , when his beatification was prepared. McCown was also involved in the investigation of a corpse that, as it turned out, had been erroneously attributed to the flight pioneer Amelia Earhart .

Publications

External Publications

With Arthur Keith : The Stone Age of Mount Carmel. Vol. II: The Fossil Human Remains from the Levalloiso-Mousterian. Oxford University Press at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1939
The Genus Palaeoanthropus and the Problem of Superspecific Differentiation among the Hominidae. In: Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol , Vol. 15, 1950, pp. 87-96
The Training and Education of the Professional Physical Anthropologist. In: American Anthropologist , Vol. 54, No. 3, 1952, pp. 313-317, doi : 10.1525 / aa.1952.54.3.02a00010