MAN’S EARLIEST ART

Greymouth Evening Star, 3 October 1928, Page 6

MAN’S EARLIEST ART

A VALUABLE COLLECTION.

Man’s earliest art so far as foundsculpture, engraving, painting, and design—} ias been assembled in replicas, casts, photographs, or copies after forty yehrs’ work by Sir Boyd Dawkins and presented to the English city of Manchester, states an overseas contemporary. .No such collection, he -says, is available elsewhere. To gain otherwise a complete view of the artistic achievements of Stone Age man one would have to visit widely separated paleolithic caves and shelters. After four decades of specialised study of these early cultural expressions of homo sapiens, the collector finds the Darwinists misleading. “It is a pity,” says Sir Boyd, “that the British Association should have lately confused the mind of the public by speaking of ‘men’ or ‘monkeymen’s creatures who really had no kinship with man at all. “Homo sapiens, it is held, did not evolve from the Neanderthal creatures in Europe, but came in, already in possession of this art of his, from Asia—came out of Asia in pursuit of the animals he hunted. The European area he occupied had been previously the hunting ground of the ape-like Neanderthal creatures, to whom man’s only relation was one of succession. What other sort of culture he had we shall not know till Siberia is explored. His art proved he had mental faculties which divided him (from the apes far more than his physical differences.”