John Russell Napier

John Russell Napier M.RCS , LRCP (* 1917 in Old Windsor , Berkshire ; † August 29, 1987 on the Isle of Mull ) was a British doctor and zoologist who also distinguished himself as a paleoanthropologist - for example as a co-discoverer of homosexuality habilis as an independent type. He was also one of the founders of modern primatology , who firmly established the subject as an independent discipline. He was one of the few researchers to investigate the phenomenon of Bigfoot in detail and from a scientific perspective.

Life

Career

After attending school in Canford , Napier studied medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital , where he received his doctorate in 1943 and subsequently rose to the position of House Surgeon , Senior House Surgeon and Chief Assistant of the orthopedic department of the associated Hill End Hospital . In 1946, at the request of the Medical Research Council, he founded a department for injuries to the peripheral nervous system there . In the same year he began working as a demonstrator at the anatomy department of the London School of Medicine for Women and subsequently worked with Cyril Barnett under the direction of David Vaughan Davies as a lecturer at St Thomas' Hospital .

After a one-year visiting professorship at Iowa State University , he began research and teaching at the Royal Free Hospital in 1952, which had a cooperation with his old workplace, the London School of Medicine for Women. His research focus was in particular the anatomy of the hand and foot . Since he was convinced that human anatomy could not be understood without knowledge of the species closely related to humans (i.e. primates in particular), the Unit of Primatology of the Royal Free Hospital was founded on his initiative, which he held from 1952 to 1967 Board. This was the first institution of its kind in Great Britain, which also attracted numerous students to the field of research and which therefore resulted in numerous well-known primatologists. Napier himself also excelled in the field of comparative anatomy .

Later scientific activities

Due to his interdisciplinary knowledge of medicine and biology, he was asked by Wilfrid Le Gros Clark in the late 1950s to examine the forelimbs of a proconsul africanus found by Louis Leakey in Kenya . Together with Peter R. Davis , he published the result of this in 1959, the study "The Fore-Limb Skeleton and Associated Remains of Proconsul africanus" , for which he received some bones of the examined pre-human (including the hands) as a thank you.

In 1964, Napier, who began to be more interested in paleoanthropology, together with Leakey and Phillip Tobias, carried out the study of some East African fossils, which turned out to be of a new species. This meant the discovery of the prehistoric man Homo habilis , which, however, was generally recognized in the professional world only after a few decades. As a first-rate expert in this field, Napier was responsible for examining the bones of the hands and feet in this project. Between 1962 and 1967 he also supervised Alan Walker's doctoral thesis on the modes of locomotion of fossil and living lemurs .

In 1956, John Napier introduced the technical naming of the two fundamentally different forms of gripping by hand: power grip and precision grip .

From 1967 to 1969 he was director of the Primate Biology Program and curator of the mammalian department of the Smithsonian Institution and from 1969 to 1973 director of a comparable institution (the Primate Biology Unit ) at Queen Elizabeth College, London University. Napier was also a co-founder and first president of the Primate Society of Great Britain , established in 1967, and reached a wider audience in a series of Royal Institution Christmas lectures (television lectures broadcast by the BBC in 1970/71). The same applies to the programs he presented on biological topics, "Life" in 1966 and "Animal Game" in 1973/74. From 1973 until his retirement in 1978 he was visiting professor of primate biology at Birkbeck College .

Private

Napier had been married since 1936 to Prudence Hero Napier , a year his senior , who also became a senior primatologist and helped found the Unit of Primatology at the Royal Free Hospital. Together with her he wrote numerous joint publications, including the “Handbook of Living Primates” , which became a standard work. John Russell Napier died in 1987 at the age of 70.

In addition to his scientific activities, he was also active as a magician and from 1951 to 1967 a member of the Magic Circle , on whose council he sat in 1958 as deputy chairman. However, his performances were either free or donated to charitable causes.

Research and analysis of the Bigfoot phenomenon

His anatomical and systematic research focused on the musculoskeletal system of humans and primates, as well as the mobility and gripping ability of their fingers and toes. In particular, his classifications of human grip techniques and of the supporting and musculoskeletal system have established themselves in research. In addition, he also published on other topics of primatology (such as the evolution of the Old World monkeys and the rhesus monkeys ) as well as palaeoecology , medicine and hominization .

John Russell Napier was one of the first scientists to pay serious attention to the Bigfoot phenomenon. He interviewed alleged eyewitnesses, visited alleged sighting sites and analyzed alleged recordings from a biological-anatomical perspective. While at the Smithsonian Institution, he examined the well-known Patterson-Gimlin film , a video that is said to show Bigfoot. Napier classified it as a hoax after a thorough investigation , but without giving any concrete evidence of it. In a book published in 1973 he came to the conclusion that the various testimonies do not represent any evidence of the existence of Bigfoot, but that they cannot simply be dismissed out of hand.

Fonts (selection)

• with Peter R. Davis: The Fore-Limb Skeleton and Associated Remains of Proconsul africanus. In: Fossil Mammals of Africa. No. 16. British Museum (Natural History), London 1959, pp. 1-69.
• with LSB Leakey and PV Tobias: A new species of the genus Homo from Olduvai Gorge. In: Nature. Vol. 202, No. 1, 1964, pp. 7-9; doi: 10.1038 / 202007a0 (PDF; 344 kB) .
• with NA Barnicot (ed.): The primates (= 10th Symposium of the Zoological Society of London). The Zoological Society of London, London 1963.
• with Prudence Hero Napier: A Handbook of Living Primates. Academic Press, New York 1967.
• with Prudence Hero Napier: Old World Monkeys. Evolution, Systematics, and Behavior. Academic Press, New York 1970.
• Roots of Mankind. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington 1971.
• Bigfoot. The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality. EP Dutton, New York 1973.
• Monkeys without tails. Taplinger Pub. Co., New York 1976.
• Primate Locomotion (= Oxford Biology Readers, 41). Oxford University Press, London 1976.
• Primates and Their Adaptations. Carolina Biological Supply Co., Burlington (NC) 1977.
• Hands. Pantheon Books, New York 1980.
• with Prudence Hero Napier: The Natural History of the Primates. MIT Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) 1985.

literature

• Michael Herbert Day : In Memoriam Professor John Russell Napier, MRCS, LRCP, D.Sc. In: Journal of Anatomy. Volume 159, 1988, pp. 227-229, PMC 1262025 (free full text)
• Brigitte Sénut: John Russell Napier (nécrologie). In: Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'anthropologie de Paris, XIV ° Série. Vol. 5, No. 1-2, 1988, pp. 131-135 ( online ).

Web links

• Biographical information from the UCL Library Archives

Individual evidence

1. ^ John R. Napier: The Prehensile Movements of the Human Hand. In: The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. Volume 38B, No. 4, 1956, pp. 902-913, doi: 10.1302 / 0301-620X.38B4.902 , full text