EVOLUTION OF MAN

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 January 1928, Page 12

EVOLUTION OF MAN

DR. HRDLICKA’S THEORY.

Dr Ales Hrdlicka, who delivered the Huxley memorial lecture in. the Lecture Room of the Royal Society, London, took as his subject “The Neanderthal Phase’ of Man.”

The lecturer said that prehistory, in relation to the Mousterian period, appeared to have reached a position approaching dogmatism, but the more the material remains of Early Man accumulated and were better understood, the more it was “sensed” that the whole Neanderthal question needed revision. If the given assumptions were true, we were confronted by some strange major phenomena —a long double line of human evolution either in near-by or the same territories, a sudden extinction of one. of these lines and evolutionary sluggishness or pause in the other. These hypotheses led to a maze of difficulties and contradictions. They led to an outright polygeny—which was undemonstrable and improbable —or they conceded the evolution of homo sapiens from the same old stock that gave also homo neanderthalensis; but. denied the possibility of such evolution from Neanderthal man later on. They gave us homo sapiens, without showing why or how or where lie developed liis superior make-up, and implied that while he evidently developed much more rapidly at first to reach the status of homo sapiens, he then slackened greatly to remain, from the beginning of the post-glacial period to this day at nearly the same evolutional level. There were other geographical and historical difficulties and . contradictions involved in the position at. present reached by pre-history. Valid answers to the questions which these difficulties suggested were as yet impossible, but it was possible to suggest certain indications. The Penck-Bruckner conception of the Ice Age as composed of four distinct periods of glaciation with three wellmarked inter-glacial periods, did not harmonise with either the palaeontological or the human evidence. Both these tended to show but one main inter-glacial interval,from which there was a gradual progression towards an irregular post-glacial. The Mousterian o.r Neanderthal phase of man began towards the end of the warm main inter-glacial. During this period Man was brought face to face with great changes of environment, calling for new adaptations and developments. Such a major change in the principal environmental factors must inevitably have brought about greater mental as well as physical exertion and an intensification of natural selection, with the survival of only the more fit. These were the very essentials of. progres--1 sive evolution. Strong evidence that a relatively rapid progressive change, both mental and physical, was actually taking place during the Neanderthal period was furnished by the great variability of the skeletal remains from this time. Such evolution would certainly differ from region to region, and it was conceivable, if not inevitable, that, with these processes, towards the height of the glacial invasion the population decreased in numbers, and that the most fit group or groups eventually alone survived. Here seemed to be a. relatively simple, natural explanation of the progressive evolution of Neanderthal man and such evolution would inevitably carry his most advanced forms to those of the primitive homo sapiens. A critical examination of the known facts did not favour fire assumption of a far-back common parentage and early Quaternary separation of homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens, for lack of cultural evidence of homo sapiens and other great difficulties. It was equally unable to favour 1 a separate origin of the two stocks with subsequent hybridization, for there was no evidence of the Pre-Aurigna-cian whereabouts and the doings of homo sapiens, there was no trace of his ancestry, and moreover, it was impossible’ to conceive his origin without a Neanderthal-like stage of development. The thoroughly sifted indication appeared to the lecturer to favour the third assumption—which was the evolution of the Neanfierthaler into later Man, There appeared to be less justification for the conception of a Neanderthal species than there would be for that of a Neanderthal phase of Man.