THE FIRST MAN.

Grey River Argus, 28 January 1911, Page 7

THE FIRST MAN.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS ON HIS BIRTH.

IN THE ICE ' AGE

Professor Boyd Dawkins, one of the great -authorities on the mammas of the Pleistocene or Ice Age, in his Huxley memorial lecture, marshal led the evidence which points to the fact that man first appeared in that epoch. The view of the higher antiquity of man based on the discovery of chipped flints in earlier ages has been rendered untenable, as it can be proved that these forms can be, amd indeed have been, produced by natural Agencies. The skull and thighbone found by M. Dubois in a Pleistocene river deposit at Trinil, in Java, in. 1894, Professor Dawkins regarded as belonging to a real precursor of man not only appearing at a point in the geological history where it was to be expected, but in a .tropical region, tak en by Lord ; Avebury" and others to • have been the birthplace of the human race.

, In Europe, continued the professor, there is ample evidence of the existence of the river-drift man aaid of the cave-dweller in the caverns and in the river valleys of the Glacial Age over the whole region between the M'editeraanean aaid the Baltic. Europe in the Ice Age was invaded dryshod by the earliest men from the south by way of Gibraltar and Sicily. The climate then was coatinental in character, with cold winters and hot summers.

The liver-drift's man's implements •mark his existence in North Africa, Palestine, Arabia, and India, and over the south and middle zones of Europe .as far north a-s .Yorkshire,, crossing on foot from Germany and France.

The cave-men, marking an advance in culture, lived almost wholly in the regions north of the Alps and Pyranees, and his weapons * are found north of Yorkshire. The cave-men probably came into Europe from and retreated into Northern Asia at the close of the Ice Age. , The Ice Age was undoubtedly of vast duration, and the antiquity of man is correspondingly great, but, concluded the professor, "the more minutely I examine the events that have taken place since man appeared in Europe the more /profoundly am I impressed with the vastness of his antiquity . aii'd with the futility of any attempt to compute it in terms of years."