EARLY MAN

Evening Post, Volume CXIV, Issue 69, 19 September 1932, Page 7

EARLY MAN

OLDEST KNOWN SKULL

SCIENTISTS DECLARATION

(From "The Post's" Representative.)

' LONDON,, 12th August. Professor G. Elliot Smith (Chair of Anatomy, London University) made some announcements which surprised the delegates to the International Congress of Prehistoric and ProtO:historic Sciences moeting in London.

The professor, speaking on "New Discoveries in Human Palaeontology," mentioned the important discovery last month by Professor Eugeae Dubois of three femora from Trinil, with'peculiarities noted before only in one human femur found (also at Trinil) in 1892 He suggested that this femur might possibly be associated with the Homo soloensis found in five fossilised skulls in Java by Mr. Oppenoorth. A comparison of the fragmentary cranium of Piltdown man with casts of Sinanthropus showed from the back, he said the same curiously pentagonal shape, and he declared that the morphologist would be convinced that the cranium of Piltaown man was at least as simian as the jaw found with it. In the Lloyd's skull we probably had the* first genuine remains of Homo sapiens The skull belonged to a woman about fifty years old, who v was probably lefthanded. Where the fragments were dug up (and at first discarded as pottery) the soil of blue clay, 42ft below the surface, was at first supposed to be post-Mousterian in age. A re-exam-mation of the evidence by Miss Garrod had indicated that the fossil was as old as Mousterian, and probably a great deal older. There was a high degree of probability that it belongld to the species Homo sapiens, and was about ten times as old as any other representative of the species. At the time of the discovery, the proE? SBof.:, elated, experts argued fiercely about its age. Pending full examination it was assumed to belong to the A.urignacian Period.

Professor Elliot Smith explained that he had arranged for the Lloyd's skull to figure in the remakable display of early skulls exhibited in the Department of Anatomy at University College, for the convenience of delegates and visitors.

It wag taken to its destination in fe, large glass case and placed alongside a lead facsimile of its brain pan—a brown and half-glossy object resembling something between a large breakfast roll and .a Salljr Lunn.