LIKE ABOS

Gisborne Times, Volume LXXII, Issue 11405, 5 January 1931, Page 3

LIKE ABOS

LIFE OF THE PEKING MAN

FAMILY TREE.

THICK HEAD, MODERN JAW

•tr r LONDON,-Dec. 24

■ The race to which the Peking man belonged probably' lived like the Tasmanian aborignes, eating shellfish; small game which they knocked over with sticks, and also berries and wild fruits, according to Professor Grafton Elliot Smith, the Australian born anthropologist.

Interviewed by' “The Sun” on his return from a trip, which he made to China to inspect the Peking skull, Professor Smith said that the cave deposits in which the skull was found did not yield a single tool. Probably these men did not use even Palaeolithic tools, though undoubtedly they picked up stones and tossed sticks a-s missiles.

The character of the ...brain indicated .that' they possessed articulate speech. The skull was extraordinarily thick and the brain capacity was considerably below that of the Piltdown man, which measured 1250 cubic centimetres, compared with 1400 in modern man.

The character of the jaw resembled the modern. It was utterly different from the Neanderthal and Rhodesian men, while the skull possessed the most promitive characteristics.

There were other indications that the Peking man was in the direct lino of descent ftom hoiho sapient and perhaps unlike the Neander oal and others belonging to varieties ui man at present extinct.

•In some respects he was intermediate- between the Piltdown skull and Pithecanthropus ere'etus. He sugges ted a. race of primitive human beings widely spread over the old wor'.l in the Pleistocene period, and aided that the facts do hot prove the fradio of the humani .race to have been in Eastern Asia.

Professor Eliott Smith stated that the geological survey which lev to the discovery was directed by Ting, who was a pupil at Glasgow of Professor J.',''W. Gregory, formerly of Melbourne.