Francis Turville-Petre

Francis Adrian Joseph Turville-Petre (4 March 1901 – 16 August 1942) was a British archaeologist, famous for the discovery of the Homo heidelbergensis fossil Galilee Man in 1926, and for his work at Mount Carmel, in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, now Israel. He was a close friend of Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden. Life Francis Turville-Petre was born into a Catholic, landed gentry family in England, the oldest of the five children of Oswald and Margaret Petre (née Cave). He was the older brother of Gabriel Turville-Petre, the noted scholar of Icelandic and early Scandinavian. The family moved to the ancestral home of Bosworth Hall, Husbands Bosworth, Leicestershire in 1907. Turville-Petre went up to Exeter College, Oxford in 1920. He was admitted as a Diploma student in Anthropology at Michaelmas Term, 1921, studying physical anthropology and cultural anthropology (ethnology with archaeology and technology at the Pitt Rivers Museum). He was awarded the Certificate in Physical Anthropology in 1922 and a Diploma in 1924. Following the completion of his studies in Oxford, Turville-Petre went to work on excavations in the Levant. In 1925 he conducted digs in two caves in the Nahal Amud in Galilee, Israel, Mugharet el-Zuttiyeh (Robber's Cave) and Mugharet el-Emirah (Princes' Cave), both near the Sea of Galilee. It was in the Zuttiyeh cave that he discovered the partial frontal cranial remains of what was first thought to be a Neanderthal individual. The fossil was dubbed the "Galilee skull" and was eventually classified as Homo heidelbergensis. Galilee Man was the first hominid fossil to be unearthed in Western Asia. The fossil is presently housed in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, and a cast of the skull is on permanent display in the Israel Museum. Turville-Petre was later invited by Dorothy Garrod to join her excavations at Kebara Cave on Mount Carmel. He also took part in excavations in the Sulaimaniya administrative region in Iraqi Kurdistan in October – December 1928, excavating with Garrod the caves of Zarzi and Hazar Merd.