Józef Szujski ( I83S 1883) o badaniach nad pierwostanem człowieka
Abstract
Since 1863 information about the discoveries made by Jacques Boucher de Perthes and other
scholars and proving the great antiquity of man and his culture began to reach Poland, at that time
still occupied by Russia, Austria and Prussia as a result of partitions that took place in the
previous century.
The extention of the history of man and the evidence of the gradual development of human
culture could not leave Polish historians indifferent. In 1867 opinion on this subject was given by
Józef Szujski, one of the founders of the Cracow school of history, later professor in the
Department of the History of Poland, founded in 1869 at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow,
the secretary of the Academy of Learning, writer and conservative politician. His article: Badania
nad pierwostanem człowieka (Study of the primeval state of man) was published in the conservative
periodical „Przegląd Polski". In this paper Szujski emphatically opposed the use of Darvinian
evolutionism in the study of the earliest history of man and his culture. Though he recognized the
fact that man had encountered some species of animals now extinct and that in Western Europe
the bones of these animals were occasionally accompanied by primitive artifacts, he tended to
think that it was a trace of degenerated human groups cut off from the great stock of humankind
„growing on the upland of Iran or on the Mesopotamian plain". Szujski advocated the possibly
shortest chronology and thought following Rheinhold Pallmann - that the youngest Swiss pile
dwellings contained Roman relics. Son of the Catholic Church, he presents the origin of man and
his culture according to the spirit of the Church’s teaching of those days.
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