MEASURING BACK

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27404, 17 July 1954, Page 3

MEASURING BACK

Man, Time and Fossils. The Story of Evolution. By Ruth Moore. Drawings by Sue Richert. Jonathan Cape. 382 pp.

In this fascinating book, designed for the layman, a summary is presented of the discoveries of recent years that have caused our understanding of the science of evolution to take a sudden leap forward.. Wartime research and the precision methods of atomic physics and chemistry have made possible some of these discoveries: a way has been found to use fluorine to determine the relative ages of human and animal bones buried in the same deposit; and radiochemists can now measure the actual age in years—up to 25,000 years—of any scrap of organic material. By the use of the fluorine method, the deliberate faking of the Piltdown Man (in which a genuine skull had been attached to the jawbone of a 10-year-old monkey) was exposed. This exposure clarified some of the scientists’ difficulties: for Piltdown Man was actually “a most awkward and perplexing element in the fossil record of the Hominidae.” It can now be concluded that modern man dates from much .more recent times than was formerly supposed—about 50,000 years ago. And modern work in genetics is beginning to show how homo sapiens could have in fact evolved from ape-man in this comparatively short time. Man’s sojourn on this planet is being revealed as a mere moment, for while the age of “home sapines” is being shortened by the new methods of dating, the age of the earth is being lengthened, and it is now estimated at something in the neighbourhood of 11,000,000 years. As a background to her accounts of these great new discoveries and the scientists responsible for them, Ruth Moore outlines the whole story of evolution. Her first section describes the work of Darwin, Lamarck, de Vries, Mendel and others: and her second, the discovery of the famous fossilised ape-men of Java of Peking—whose total disappearance during the war is one of the mysteries of the story of evolution —and finally of Sterkfontein in South Africa, where the “missing link” was found at long last