"MISSING LINK"

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 59, 7 September 1937, Page 11

"MISSING LINK"

A COMPLETE SKULL

FOUND AT TRINIL

PITHECANTHROPUS ERECTUS

(Received September 7, 11.15 bjm.)

BATAVIA, September \9.

Dr. yon Koeningwald, head of the geological service of the Dutch East Indies, has unearthed at Trinil a complete skull of Pithecanthropus erectus. an ape-like ancestor of man, of which a portion of a skull was found in 1891, also at Trinil, causing a sensation among scientists all over the world. The discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus has been held to be the one which throws most light on the evolutionary progress of man. It was made in Java in 1891-92, by Professor Eugene Dubois, then a surgeon in the colonial military service and later professor of geology at the University of Amsterdam. In a stratum which contained the fossil bones of many extinct species of animals he obtained five fragments of a strange form of being, on* which he regarded as, a transitional form between»man and ape—a real missing link. He named it Pithecanthropus erectus, and assigned it to a special family of primates, one lying o» the borderline between the anthropoids and -man. The five fossil fragments found were skull cap, which outwardly had the form that might be expected in a giant form of gibbon, a left tbifh bone, and three teeth. The most distant of the fragments were twenty paces apart. Later he added a sixth fragment-part of a lower jaw found in another part of the island, but in a stratum of the same geological age. The skull cap is flat, low, and has great eyebrow ridges; its characteristics are more simian than human, yet when Professor Dubois succeeded m obtaining a cast from the interior of the skull cap the cast bore on it the convolutionary pattern of the brain o£ Pithecanthropus, ' and that pattern proved to be altogether human. Pithecanthropus, the fossil man of Java, had a brain which was smaller, simpler, and infinitely more primitive than that of the lowest living man. AR AIN IN EVOLUTIQN. By this discovery Professor Dubois caught the human brain in the act.ot evolving. Certain cortical or convolutionary areas in .man's to"™.""* known to be concerned with sifm, hearing, and touch, and the receptions of messages from the sense m** motor area is concerned in the inmation and control of voluntary movements. Between these primary areas of the cortex lie association areas which have to do with the »f»"r"* the interpretation of what is /seen, heard, or felt. The cortex of part of the frontal lobe is concerned with the acquisition of 'skilled .^mente. These secondary or association areas, which lie between and separate tne primary areas, are the basis. ©« mans educability, his capacity to learni from exDerience. In the brain of Pithecansssxa'ssifsr.sag' °tK2' si-* »' «;? <■»'";«•*■* suited in at ■ ™™l"3*!tJ'as£beings occasionally fall c£ Pithecanthropus, in size.of brain, »« been placed on the verge of humanityThe thigh bone is human altogether, Jroof that he walked like a man^ ** teeth are essentially human in.crown and root. Pithecanthropus has been aligned to a date late in the Pliocene, period. __—^^»™m^^^^