MAN'S EARLY ANCESTRY

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3939, 18 March 1930, Page 2

MAN'S EARLY ANCESTRY

THE PEKING DISCOVERY

UNIQUE AND EPOCHAL

Groat interest is being taken by scientific men in " -.gland and on the Continent in the recent discovery near Peking of the fossilised bones of ten prehistoric men and a complete human skull. The discoveries were made by Dr Dawidson Black, the Canadian palieorrfologist, and his fellow workers, repi’esenting the Rockefeller Foundation and the Geological Survey of China.

Mr A. T. Hopwood, assistant keeper in the department of geology at the Natural History Museum, London, told a representative of the ‘ Daily Telegraph ’ that “we may hope to derive from the new discoveries almost complete knowledge of one of the most primitive types of human being that lias ever existed.” Dr Black is a wellknown anatomist, who has given much time and thought to the problem of primitive man in the Peking area and in China generally. Mr A. S. Woodward, secretary of the Royal Anthropological Institute,- remarked that if the discovery did not prove that Central Asia was the cradle of the human race, it showed that some of the earliest relics of man were to be found there. The skull is said to be perfect. The remains were estimated to have an antiquity of from a quarter of a million to a million years. Scientific men were loth to express any definite opinions without more direct evidence, but Sir Arthur Keith, the anthropologist, said that great importance attached to anything found in the cave and associated with the name of Dr Black. In a contributed article to the ‘Daily Telegraph,’ Professor G. Elliot Smith described the event as unique. “For once, ” he added, “ the much-abused term epoch-making is the just and appropriate description. The discovery in China of a primitive member of the human family roughly contemporaneous with the ape man of Java (Pithecanthropus) and the Dawn man of Piltdown (Eoanthropus), but different in type from both of them, is an event of special significance, “ not merely by reason of the intrinsic interest of enabling us to make the acquaintance of a hitherto unknown and unsuspected relative, but also because the new evidence helps to r-solve the doubts concerning the other two Early Pleistocene men, and to establish on a sure foundation the most primitive phase of the history of the human family.” “ When two years ago Dr Davidson Black proposed the creation of a new’ genus of mankind, on the basis of a fossilised tooth found in a fissure of the rocky floor of the Chou Kou Tien cave, most anthropologists,” continued Professor Elliot Smith, “were doubtful of the validity of the genus he called Sinanthropus upon such slender evidence.

“ A year ago Dr Birger Bohlin, continuing the excavations in the fissure with the help of the Chinese geologists. Dr C. C. Yang and Mr W. C. Pei, provided evidence completely to justify Dr Davidson Black’s bold advertute. For thev found the remains of two skulls, a child’s and an adult’s, embedded in a matrix of stone. Along with the crushed skull of the child was found part of a jaw of a corresponding age, and with the adult brain case was found part of a jaw of appropriate age. No one doubts that the jaws belonged to the skulls .with which they were associated.

“ As both jaws present curiously apelike features, such as aroused doubt in the case of the Piltdown man, the evidence provided by the Pekinese specimens becomes doubly valuable. It establishes the fact that primitive man did, in fact, have a jaw shaped like that of a chimpanzee. The likeness of these jaws to the Piltdown jaw corroborates the verdict suggested by the crushed skulls, that the Peking man is more nearly akin to Piltdown man than to his nearer Javanese relative Pithecanthropus. “ The thinness of the crania of Sinanthropus and the less obtrusively simian features of the jaw justify the inferences made by Professor Davidson Black that the Pekinese belong to a genus different from their contemporaries in Java and Britain—one, moreover, more nearly akin to modern man.”

The chief significance of the new discoveries to Professor Elliot Smith depends upon the consideratioft that they provide Dr Davidson Black with enough material to determine, once for all. the characters of one of the Early Pleistocene genera of the human family, and by comparison with the less complete remains of Pithecanthropus and Eoanthropus to give greater confidence in the interpretation of their meaning. Thus they promise to establish, once for all, the nature and mutual relationships of these divergent human types, which are vastly more ancient than any other known members of the human family. . By settling definitely the contention that primitive men had jaws so closely resembling the chimpanzee’s so as to deceive many of the leading palaeontologists into believing them to be simian, the Chinese researches, he thinks, add important corroboration to the view that man is very intimately related to the apes. “The fact that two of these primitime genera have been found in the Far East has been claimed as supporting the view that man was evolved in Asia. But the existence of Piltdown man in the Far West and and of the apes most nearly akin to man in Africa (as well as the extinct manlike Taungs ape, discovered in Bechuanaland by Professo- Raymond Dart, and the ape called Dryopithecus in the Miocene and Pliocene of Europe) restores the balance, and leaves open the issue whether man’s immediate simian ancestor in his wanderings from the cradle of the great apes in the Sivalik Hills of India wandered east towards Java and China o; west towards Britain and Africa.

“This is one of the many problems of our evolution upon which much light may be thrown by the intensive investigation of the richest harvest of early human remains that has ever rewarded any searcher.”