Sulcal Skirmishes - The Fossil Chronicles - page 57

of Taung, and I remember that after Radinsky had read the first draft
of a paper that I was preparing in order to document my observations
about australopithecine endocasts, he told me that I could not ignore
Holloway's research just because I happened to disagree with him. In
1980, I published a detailed comparative study using human, gorilla, and
chimpanzee brains, which provided background for my observations
about australopithecines. 3 In it, I presented my case that Dart had mis-
taken the lambdoid suture for the lunate sulcus on the Taung endocast,
as Wilfrid Le Gros Clark and his colleagues had suggested long ago . 4
As Radinsky had urged, I also politely acknowledged that my views dif-
fered from Holloway's. Near the end of the paper, I stated, “The most
important conclusion of this paper is that the australopithecine lunate
sulcus was not located in a caudal human-like position, as first reported
by Dart (1925) and now generally believed. Rather, the australopithecine
lunate sulcus was relatively rostral, as in pongids.” 5 Little did I know
what I had gotten myself into!
But it didn't take long to find out, and the response from Columbia
University was chilling. Noting correctly that I had relied on tactile
cues from feeling the surfaces of endocasts (palpation) in addition to
observing them visually, Holloway commented in a published response
to my paper, “Falk places undue stress on palpation as a technique
which is somehow more valuable in her study than those of others who
have not mentioned it,” and he went on to add that there were few prac-
ticing “phrenologists,” which he qualified with the remark, “I have used
this term even though it has negative connotations. 'Paleoneurologists'
would be better, but given the stress on palpation and surface features,
this term has a certain embarrassing appropriateness.” 6 (As mentioned
in chapter 2, phrenology was a nineteenth-century pseudoscience whose
basic premise was that personality traits and skills could be “read” by
feeling the bumps on a person's head, which supposedly reflected the
relative size of underlying parts of the brain.) He also observed that,
in his opinion, almost none of the numerous sulci I had identified on
australopithecine endocasts (shown below) could be identified with any