FOSSILS IN BURMA

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 83, 8 April 1938, Page 4

FOSSILS IN BURMA

LINKED WITH PEKING MAN?

We have found fossil animal contemporaries of the Man .in /the Shan Plateau in limestone caverns; artificially dug up by'villagers in, quest of precious stones, writes Dr. Hellmut de Terra, director of the American-South-eastern Asia Expedition for Early Man from Burma to the "New'.YorkjTimes." , Prominent among these fossils are extinct types of elephant, • bison, rhinoceros, and panda, the descendants of which still inhabit the highlands of South China and. incidentally, provide some of the rarest exhibits for our zoological gardens. Apparently these animals spread from South China into Burma and may well have caused the first dispersal of /that extinct human race to which we'attribute the manufacture of the stone tools recently discovered by our party in Upper Burma. ' . . As far as we can judge from the material collected 'to date, this ancient industry is- only equalled in the primitive nature 'of the designs by the artifacts ('implements) ' found in "the Choukoutien caves, the site of Peking Man. The paucity of tool.types,,and ■ the crudeness of the workmanship point to a creator of undeveloped: intelligence, yet of sufficient cleverness to have carefully selected the most workable type of rock. - - ,»■ In those days dense, hard rock was as preciou.. a commodity for man as oil and iron are nowadays. A 'good, supply of raw material was the-mag-net 'that attracted ■ man to a . given region. This fact was brought", hpme to us vividly.as we searched the^. old river terraces of Yenarig-yiiung for stone tools by the sight of a thousand oil'derricks that have been erected"by modern man. drawn, to this barren desert country by a raw material neces« sary tb present-day civilisation.MAY Alb; SOLVING DISPUTE. The new evidence that Peking Man's contemporaries may have migrated from South China to-Burma in pursuit of the animals that he hunted for his food may -shed further light on the strange "arena'Mn which tlie skulls of the two most ancient humans have been battling'during the past ten years for the right, "to ..the title "Anthropological Adam," comments the "New Yorls Times." The two ancient combatants are the Java Man (Pithecanthropus Erectus) found some fifty years ago in Java by ( i Dr. Eugene Dubois, and the . Peking Man (Sinanthropus Pekinensis) found near Peking, China, about ten' years ago. Both are believed to have existed 500,000 to 1.000,000 years ago, but it is not definitely known which of the two is the older.The evidence so far has been in favour of the greater antiquity of the Peking Man, though the possibility has not- been, ruled out, that the- two ancient men were.contemporaries. Until now no evidence., has been available that the Peking , Man may have travelled from his native, haunts in China to other lands in search of food. 'v --' ■ . Since tho crude human tools recently found by Dr. de Terra's expedition in , Upper Burma are equalled 'in the primitive nature of their design only by the artifacts of the Peking Man, it may well turn out that the Peking Man was the* direct ancestor of the. extinct race of the Burma' Man. Further finds of the ancient tools of the Java Man, it is hoped, will maka t it possible to compare them with thos* of the Peking Maru