Wilfrid Le Gros Clark

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Sir Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark (born June 5, 1895 in Hemel Hempstead , Hertfordshire , England , † June 28, 1971 in Burton Bradstock , Dorset , England) was a British anatomist , primatologist and paleoanthropologist . From 1934 until his retirement in 1962 he was Dr Lee's Professorship of Anatomy at Oxford University . Among other things, he became known in specialist circles for his research on stimulus transmission in the visual system and in the olfactory system , and also for his involvement in exposing the Piltdown man as a scientific falsification .

Life

Wilfrid Le Gros Clark was the second of three sons of Pastor Travers Clark. After attending Blundell's School in Tiverton , he was trained as a doctor at St Thomas' Hospital in London . Immediately after completing the first section of his training, he was drafted into the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1917 ; until the end of the First World War he was stationed in Wimereux , France .

After going back to St Thomas' Hospital, he completed his specialist training and was employed as a surgeon in that hospital. With the long-term goal of working in the field of comparative anatomy and gaining initial experience, he went to Sarawak , now Malaysia, as Principal Medical Officer from 1920 to 1923 . In addition to his medical practice, he studied the blueprint of tarsius and shrews - both distant relatives of the apes - and put an anatomical collection of these mammals. After his return to England he worked again temporarily at St Thomas' Hospital and at St Bartholomew's Hospital , first as a reader , from 1927 as a professor. In 1934 Le Gros Clark moved to Oxford as a professor .

His specialty was initially neuroanatomy , specifically research into stimulus processing in the thalamus and hypothalamus , he also researched the structure of the retina and the transmission of stimuli from the eye and nose to the brain. His textbook The tissues of the body , published for the first time in 1939 and reissued until the 1970s, made a major contribution to eliminating the traditional separation of anatomy, neurology and physiology.

In numerous publications he also dealt with the tribal history of primates , where he acquired special expertise in the field of comparative neuroanatomy of the so-called half - apes . His influential textbook Early Forerunners of Man was created as early as 1934 , and was continued in 1960 - after several revised editions - under the title The Antecedents of Man . In 1947 - after inspection of numerous fossils discovered in Africa - he made a decisive contribution to the fact that the child of Taung and the fossils of the genus Australopithecus discovered up to then were referred to as hominid (the current name is hominin ) and thus by virtue of his authority to the ancestors of man were asked.

In 1953, Wilfrid Le Gros Clark together with Kenneth Oakley (1911–1981, British Museum ) and - on his initiative - Joseph Sidney Weiner (1915–1982, University of Oxford) proved that the Piltdown man was a forgery. Together with Louis Leakey he published the first description of Proconsul major in 1949 and the first description of Kenyapithecus africanus in 1967 .

In 1923 he married Freda Constance Giddey, with whom he had two daughters. After the death of his wife in 1963, he married Violet Browne, the widow of Dr. Leonard Brown.

Honors

Fonts (selection)

  • Early Forerunners of Man: A Morphological Study of the Evolutionary Origin of the Primates. Bailliere, Tindall & Cox, London 1934.
  • Man's Place Among the Primates. In: Man. Volume 35, 1935, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.2307 / 2790360 .
  • The tissues of the body. An introduction to the study of anatomy. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1939.
  • Palaeontological Evidence Bearing on Human Evolution . In: Biological Reviews. Volume 15, No. 2, 1940, pp. 202-230, doi: 10.1111 / j.1469-185X.1940.tb00755.x .
  • Practical Anatomy. Edward Arnold Publishers Ltd., London 1946.
  • History of the Primates. The Trustee's of the British Museum, London 1949.
  • The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution: An Introduction to the Study of Paleoanthropology. University of Chicago Press, 1955.
  • The Exposure of the Piltdown Forgery. In: Nature . Volume 175, 1955, pp. 973-974, doi: 10.1038 / 175973a0
  • The Antecedents of Man. An Introduction to the Evolution of the Primates. Quadrangle Books, Chicago 1960.
  • Man-Apes or Ape-Men? The Story of Discoveries in Africa. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Clark, Sir Wilfrid Edward Le Gros (1895–1971). Biographical entry on the website of the Royal College of Surgeons of England , dump of 22 September 2016
  2. ↑ Sir Wilfrid Edward le Gros Clark. In: Journal of anatomy. Volume 97, January 1963, pp. I2-i6, PMID 17105136 , PMC 1244250 (free full text).
  3. ↑ Sir Wilfrid le Gros Clark - the wide horizon of an anatomist. In: New Scientist, July 21, 1960, pp. 218-219
  4. ^ Book Review by William W. Howells in: Americal Journal of Human Genetics. Volume 13, No. 2, 1961, p. 283.
  5. ↑ Wilfrid Le Gros Clark and Louis Leakey: Diagnoses of East African Miocene Hominoidea. In: Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society. Volume 105, 1949, pp. 260-264, doi: 10.1144 / GSL.JGS.1949.105.01-04.10
  6. ^ WE Le Gros Clark, LSB Leakey: The Miocene Hominoidea of ​​East Africa. In: Fossil Mammals of Africa. No. 1, British Museum of Natural History, 1950.
  7. ^ Member History: WE Le Gros Clark. American Philosophical Society, accessed June 20, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Le Gros Clark, Wilfrid
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Le Gros Clark, Wilfrid Edward (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British anatomist, primatologist and paleoanthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 5, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Hemel Hempstead , Hertfordshire , England
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 1971
Place of death Burton Bradstock , Dorset , England