BATTLE IS ON.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 221, 19 September 1938, Page 4

BATTLE IS ON.

SCIENTISTS SCOFF. SQUABBLE OVER A SKULL. CLAPHAM DENTIST'S FIND. (Special.—By Air Mall.) LONDON, September 3. Cambridge mustered the greatest brains at the British Association meeting to browbeat a Clapham dentist. Five learned Fellows of the Royal Society, three doctors of science, led the attack, and squ/ibbled furiously over the skull of a Kentish girl who lived anyt'.iinj; over 250,000 years ago. If the dentist is right, the whole of Britain's early history must be rewritten. Science will not ad'niit that possibility. So the battle is on. As well as extracting teeth in Clapham, Alvan'T. Marston picks up fossils every week-end in a Thames-side gravel pit. at Swanscombe, near Dartford. Hi* whole heart is in archaeology; he has been digging for five years. To the learned men he chanted: — Way down upon the Swanee Hirer, That** where I roam. That's where my.heart Is turning ever That's where I found my bone. Nobody smiled; this is a serious fight. But when the scientists had fired all their bi<r rutins Alvan Marston was still undaunted. Clutching the plaster cast of his precious skull (the original is in the Natural History Museum), his greying hair ruffled, a worried' frown on his brow, he stuck out his jaw defiantly and j answered back again* and again. Fight to Last Ditch. "When I found this bone I let myself in for a whole pack of trouble," he said to a reporter. "They think they know, but I've done the work, and I'll fight to the last ditch." He believes this young woman to be the most ancient Briton we have heard about so far—a girl who lived when elephants bathed in the Thames and elks ranged the Kentish Weald stalked by hunters with flint axes and dogs much like the Afghan wolfhound. Side by side with the skull, he found the bones of a mijrhty antlered stap. the back tooth of a rhinoceros, the tusk of an elephant. Old Father Thames had buried them. Centuries of time had laid a pall of gravel above them. Sir Arthur Keith, silvery-haired, rather apologetic, most famous of the learned men, looked kindly on this David among the Goliaths of science and said:— "I rather think Mr. Marston has made too many deductions from his find. You will remember Don Quixote, who thought his village-maiden sweetheart was a princess? I rather think that with the Swanscombe skull, splendid thing as it is, Mr. Marston is inclined to exaggerate a bit." Smiling, he turned towards that unsmiling little man and said gently:— "I shouldn't worry about these details. I should be proud of what I'd been able to do. It's a great find." " Bunkum! Bunkum! ** The audience murmured approval. Mr. Marston looked glum. Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, who found the famous Piltdown skull in 1912, and from it built up Britain's early story, was brief, a little impatient. He agreed that the new skull was most important, but scoffed at the suggestion that this young woman of Kent could be anything like so old as his Piltdown man.

Oxford University'* Professor W. E. LeGros Clark, brisk and businesslike, was "willing to admit that there may be something just a little exceptional about the Swanscombe skull," but said he had spent three weeks going over it with a magnifying glass and was absolutely convinced, "on the evidence of the fragments that are available, that this fossil skull is indistinguishable from homo sapiens." That leaves the Piltdown man as our oldest inhabitant. But Alvan Marston would not recant. "Bunkum!" he said. "Bunkum! That Piltdown crowd are wrong, and I'll fight until they say so." And, mysteriously, ne told of something else up his sleeve—a new bone in hia gravel pit which will give Miss Swanscombe another leg to stand on.