HOW OLD IS MAN?

Hawera Star, Volume LIII, 27 September 1933, Page 6

HOW OLD IS MAN?

DISCOVERY MAY EXPLODE OLD IDEAS. TWO NEW~THEOR lES. Man is no “recent experiment” on this earth, as many anthropologists have believed. He may, in fact, be mere million or so. This, according to “The Literary Digest,” is the opinion of Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, eminent British anthropologist, who told the International Geological Congress at Washington recently that human fragments found a few months ago by Dr. L. B. S Leakey in Tanganyika territory, south-eastern Africa, not only indicate great antiquity for men of modern tvpe, but also suggest that the birthplace of human being was in Africa. Both of these ideas run counter to opinions formerly held. It had been helioved tlin"fc ina-iikincl first human or semi-human status shortly before or during the glacial periods about 1,000,000 years ago. The age of the Tanganyika find xs determined by the bones of other animals now extinct, associated with them. Determination of the age of these depends in turn upon a long chain of eircumstancial evidence. It is possible that the associated animals did not become extinct in Africa as quickly as elsewhere, in which ease Sir Arthur’s chronology might be wrong. SUPPORT FOR THEORY.

However, a theory attributed to the late Dr W. D. Matthew lends support to it. If each race of animals evolved at a single centre, a succession of waves of increasingly differentiated genera very likely radiated outward from that centre. The latest and highest types would be found in the actual place of evolution, surrounded by rings of less advanced types of lower and lower degree. By this theory, if homo sapiens began at a centre in Africa, the Piltdown man, Java man, and Peking man < all of whom were living at the same time, about 1.000,000 years ago, at tlie extreme edges of Europe and Asia) may have been the displaced remote off-

shoots of early stages in evolution at the centre. On the same supposition, the second offshoot was probably the Neancter tha.l or Mousterian man, who \vs<* very widely distributed throughout Europe 500,000 years or so ago. The British anthropologist believes- that the Neanderthal man died out without descendants. All the men of to-day, in Lis opinion, are the progeny of a Mill later wave. The question is by ho means settled, despite the weight of Sir Arthur Smith Woodward’s opinion. The matter partly depends, of course, upon what stage, in the evolutionary process is to be called the beginning. WHICH CONTINENT. Most of the older theories assume that mail began in Europe or Asia. Almost simultaneously with Sir i Arthur’s argument in favour of Africa came word that another scientist, Gregory Mason, archaeologist of the Um versity of Pennsylvania Museum, was finding evidence that man developed neither in Europe, Asia, nor Ainca, but in America. Apes .of anthropoid type found in Honduras, and fossils of a creature known as tarsius, part ape and part tree shrew, in Wyoming, are linked by Professor Mason with man, for these creatures are possibly ancestral to him. The scientist has now gone to Central America to make a study of the apes. Both Sir Arthur unci Proleosor Mason may be right, for the latter is apparently studying a. more remote “beginning” than that which may have occurred in ‘Africa. Whether or not man began on the northern hemisphere little evidence- of pre-glacial Ameii cans has been discovered. Archaeological finds of the last- two or three years have shown, however, that various races, probably from Asia, have lived in the northern hemisphere : t different; times for at least 20,000 years.