MILLION-YEAR-OLD SKULLS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1937, Page 21

MILLION-YEAR-OLD SKULLS

Scientists of the National Geological Survey claimed today to have dug up the skulls of a million-year-old "Adam snd Eve," belonging to the Sinanthropus Pekinensis family and perhaps the parents of the famous "Peking man." Professor Franz Weidenreich, who made the sensational find on the site where the original Peking man was found forty miles south-west of Peiping, said the skulls shatter all doubts that man is descended from dwarfed apes. Science, he declared, now has skulls offering indisputable evidence of "a continuous line of evolution through the Sinanthropus and Neanderthal stages to present man." Professor Weidenreich is working with the Cenozoic research laboratory of the National Geological Survey, which is supported by a Rockefeller endowment. The two skulls. were,fo,unfl tw.o feet apart-in a cave, covered with.fee-rock

and dirt accumulation of ages, at Chou-kou-tUn, where a young Chinese geologist fcund a shell of brown bone in 1929 arid gave science its closest answer to the long sought "missing link" of human heredity. The female skull found by Professor Weidenreich was reported to be strikingly nimilar to that of the Java "ape man," who goes by the name of Pithecanthropus Erectus among scientists. The male skull, reported by Professor Weidenreich, was said to resemble the Neanderthal man. From these facts the professor was convinced that the Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus types—the Java ape man and the Peking man—are in the same category, thus providing a continuous line ol evolution. Whether they will prove to be the socalled "missing link"—a word at which geologists shudder because of its broad sweep—between man and lys alleged anthropojdal ancestors ca/i be.' determined only afterllong' study.