Karl Friedrich Hormuth

Karl Friedrich Hormuth (born April 12, 1904 in Mannheim-Lindenhof , † June 3, 1992 in Neibsheim ) was a German prehistorian . He became famous for his discovery of the stone tools of Homo heidelbergensis .

Life

After finishing school, Hormuth completed a commercial apprenticeship. Since he was interested in archeology and prehistory since his youth, he attended archaeological and geological lectures at the commercial college in Mannheim and undertook his own excavations in the Mannheim area. From 1924 he made regular visits to the sand pit of Mauer , where he found a total of 29 chert stones that could be considered prehistoric tools at the site where the lower jaw of Mauer was found. However, his finds were initially ignored.

Without an academic education, he became an assistant at the Museum of Natural History and Ethnology, which was then located in the Mannheim Armory , where he was appointed head of the prehistoric department towards the end of the 1920s. From 1926 on, study trips took him several times to the Paleolithic sites of the Cro-Magnon man in the Vézèretal to Les Eyzies . At the urging of the museum director Wilhelm Föhner (1878-1931), he subsequently acquired his Abitur in 1930 and was a guest student at Heidelberg University from 1932 to 1938 in geology with Wilhelm Salomon-Calvi (1868-1941) and history with Ernst Wahle . Hormuth was unable to complete a full course of study and his doctoral thesis, which he began in the 1930s, for family reasons and later also because of the outbreak of the Second World War.

After Föhner had been the sole supervisor of the collections in the Mannheim Armory since Föhner's death in 1931, he became curator of the Armory Museum on January 1, 1939 . After the outbreak of the Second World War he was drafted into military service, which took him to the Western Front and Norway, where he was also active in archaeological research. After being a prisoner of war for a long time, he came to Bruchsal in 1947 , where his family had meanwhile moved. He was denied reinstatement at the Mannheim armory. He then took over the management of the Bruchsal district's public education center and volunteered as a state curator for prehistory and early history. In 1963 he became head of the Municipal Museum in Bruchsal Castle .

After suffering a stroke on January 9, 1992, he died a few months later in a nursing home in Neibsheim near Bretten. He did not experience the extensive publication and presentation of his finds in the winter of 1992/93. His scientific library and the finds in his possession came into the holdings of the Mannheim Reiss Museum after his death .

Finds

The most significant finds Karl Friedrich Hormuths are the 29 chert artifacts from the sand pit wall , as tools of Homo heidelbergensis are considered. Hormuth found the first and most important find, a 42 mm long, scraper-like point, on his first visit to the sand pit in August 1924 right at the edge of the excavation. He himself published about the find in 1927 and gave a lecture at the 60th meeting of the Upper Rhine Geological Association in Bad Dürkheim in 1932 , but initially met with incomprehension and rejection. His first find remained in his private possession until his death, the remaining pieces disappeared for a long time in the collection of the Zeughaus-Museum. The finds were only given more attention in connection with an exhibition to mark the 85th anniversary of the discovery of Homo heidelbergensis in the winter of 1992/93.

literature

• Dietrich Wegner u. a .: Karl Friedrich Hormuth - A Mannheim scientist finds the tools of Homo erectus heidelbergensis . In Homo heidelbergensis von Mauer , University Press C. Winter, Heidelberg 1997, ISBN 3-8253-7105-0