MAN'S EARLIEST ART

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 68, 29 September 1928, Page 20

MAN'S EARLIEST ART

A VALUABLE COLLECTION. Man's earliest art so far as foundsculpture,' engraving, painting, and design—has been assembled- in replicas, casts, .photographs, or copies after forty years' work; by Sir Boyd Dawkins and presented to the English city of Manchester, states'an overseas contemporary.' No such collection, he says, is available elsewhere. To gain otherwise a complete view .of tho artistic achievements of Stone Age man ono would have to visit widely separated paleolithic caves and shelters. After four decades of specialised study of these early cultural expressions of homo sapiens, the - collector finds the Darwinists misleading. "It is a pity," says Sir Boyd, "that the British Association should have lately confused the mind of the public by speaking of 'men' or 'monkeymen's creatures who really had no kinship with' man at all. "Honio sapiens^ it is held, did not evolve from the Neanderthal creatures in Europe, but came in, already in possession of this art- of his, from Asia— camo out of Asia in pursuit-of tho animals he-hunted. The European area he occupied had been previously the hunting, ground of the ape:like Neanderthal creatures, to whom man's only relation was one of succession. What other sort of culture ■ho had we shall not know till Siberia is explored. His art proved ho had mental faculties which divided'him from the apes far more than his physical differences."