APE'S SKULL FOUND

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 49, 26 August 1938, Page 9

APE'S SKULL FOUND

NEAR APPROACH TO MAN

(British Official Wireless.) (Received August 26, 9 a.m.)

RUGBY, August 25,

A paper on Anthropus robustus, a hitherto unknown species of ape which lived in the pleistocene period, was read by Dr. Robert Broom, of the Transvaal Museum, before the British Association today. Remains of the skull of this early anthropoid were found by a schoolboy at Krondriai, South Africa, and Dr. Eroom said he thought there were indications that the ape would be more upright than any living anthropoid and would have a brain cavity of 600 cubic centimetres. The teeth were arranged more nearly as in man than they were in any living anthropoid.

Sir Arthur Keith agreed that these fossil remains established the existence in South Africa until comparatively recent times of a strange family of anthropoid apes making an approach to man. Had these remains come from a stratum of older geological date, experts would have hailed them as the long-sought anthropoid stage in man's ancestry. They were, in fact, Of too late an origin to play that role, for pleistocene human forms were already in existence.