WAR WOUND.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 118, 21 May 1938, Page 15

WAR WOUND.

OLDEST ON RECORD. t FOSSILISED REMAINS. LONDON. The discovery of the world's oldest war wound in the remains of a fossilised man, made at a time when archaeologists believed spears had not been invented, was described by Sir Arthur Keith, lecturing at the Roval College of Surgeons in London. Complete fossil skeletons were found in a cave at Mount Carinel which contained deposits recording the history of man in Palestine for a period of at least 100,000 years. When the hip joint of one man was cleared it was found to be "shivered," according to Sir Arthur. A hole was discovered in the middle, filled in with cave earth. The hole had the shape of a four-sided spearhead. "We did not know," lie said, "that such weapons had been invented at so early a stage. We believed the only weapons men had were stone clubs." It was the richest cave, from the archaeologists' point of view, ever opened. The strata began while man was still in an early age of stone culture, and left off about the time of Abraham. The fossilised remains were discovered by an expedition led by Miss Dorothy Garrod and financed by the American School of Prehistoric Research and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. The cave was packed with fossiliferous earth tramped down by the feet of prehistoric man until an accumulation of over 80ft had been formed. In the strata were stone tools, fossil bones of animals —many belonging to an extinct species—and human In one small cave excavated by T. D. McCown, of the American school, fossil remains of 10 people were found. Four of the remains were of children. Of the adults one is estimated to have been over 50 years of a^e. Mount Carmel is composed of limestone, and McCown, realising the impossibility of removing the bones piecemeal there and then, cut out whole sections of rock with the bones still embedded. Some of the blocks weighed more than a ton. ° Investigations showed that the men of Palestine in those days were tall, ranging from sft Bin to sft llin, but the women measured only from sft to sft 4in. Their vertebrae still retained certain Simian details. Nowhere in the world to-day, said Keith, could there be found a local group of people showing the wide range of structural variation of the fossil Palestinians. Chins were at every stage of evolution—from a chinless stage comparable to that of the chimpanzee to chins of moderate development. The disco-eries, said Keith, had thrown light on the mentality of the early stone age mankind. The tallest of the men still held the fossilised jaw •of a boar.