MAN'S ANCESTORS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 189, 12 August 1933, Page 10 (Supplement)

MAN'S ANCESTORS.

FINDING NEW LINKS.

EVIDENCE FROM KENYA.

THE TELL-TALE CHIN.

Mr. A. T. Ilopwood, who is in charge of tho fossil mammals in the Natural History Museum, described recently the finds of fossil man brought iback from Kenya in tho past few months by Dr. L. S. B. Leakey. Homo sapiens, said Mr. Hopwood, had only been traced with certainty hitherto to tho negroid Grimaldi man discovered in the South of Franco in 1901, and now in tho Museum at Monaco. "Numerous skulls which can in a sense bo called human and which aro older than the Grimaldi man, are known," he continued. "They range from Piltdown man and Heidelberg man in the Early Pleistocene period to the heavy-browed Neanderthal man in the Middle Pleistocene. None of these, however, shares sufficient characteristics with modern man to bo considered of tho same species.

Bridging Of Time.

"For twenty years a controversy has been carried on concerning a find made by Professor Hans Keek, of Berlin, at Oldoway, in Tanganyika. He a skeleton definitely of the species Homo sapiens, which was lodged in the second lowest of five successive geological beds. On tho shores of Lake Victoria Nyanza, somo 200 miles to the north of Oldoway, Dr. Leakey was fortunate enough to find tho remains of no fewer than three skulls of just the period which Oldoway man purported to represent and did not. This was at a place called Kanjera, whilo a few miles away at Kanam, he discovered a jaw-bone not only "older than Oldoway man was, but older than ho had been supposed to be, that is to say, older than Kanjera man. It is difficult at present to compute at all accurately tho relation in time between Kanjera man and Kanam man, but it is quite possible that to bridge*the distance between us and Kanam man we should have to multiply the time that separates us from Kanjera man by fifteen or twenty. While Grimaldi man left us in tho Upper Pleistocene, and Kanjera man takes lis back to the Middle Pleistocene, Kanam man brings us as far back as the Lower Pleistocene.

"A conference of palaeontologists, anatomists, and geologists who spent a week-end at Cambridge examining the Kenya finds had to decide both relative antiquity of the finds and their claim to the name of Homo sapiens. On the first point they had no doubt, referring the Kanjera man, through his associated fauna, to the Middle Pleistocene, and the Kanam deposit to the Lower Pleistocene in which animals like the mastodon and the dinotlicriuin (another relative of the elephant) survived from the still earlier Pliocene Age. On the second point they did not consider the material quite complete enough for certainty, but they wcro unanimous that on the data so far available there is nothing to contradict tho assigning both of Kanjera man and of Kanam man to the species in which we ourselves belong.

Chin As Evidence. "Kanjera man, it is true, shows in one skull an unusual thickness of bone, which can be paralleled in modern times only among patholical specimens, and among fossils only in the Piltdown and Boskop skulls. This, however, is not decisive, and one of the other Kanjera skulls, perhaps that of a woman, is thinner. As for Kanam man, we have only a portion of his lower jaw, covering tho front of the mouth and less than half of the right jaw. The important point to bo noticed is, however, that Kanam man had a chin, not so prominent as in modern races of mankind, and unusually thick in the section of the hone, but still a distinct well-developed chin.

"Xow tho chin has hitherto been taken to be among the marks of Homo sapiens. The chin-region of liis predecessors jutted backwards rather than forwards. If further portions of the skull of Kanam man are discovered, which contradict other features of Homo sapiens, wo can no longer claim him, but it is at least as likely that they will confirm us in assigning him tentatively to our species."