20,000 YEARS AGO.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue XLII, 2 May 1922, Page 6

20,000 YEARS AGO.

I ''Ji ; ROMANCE OF -lisJ-MAN EVOLUTION. | -LONDON, Feb. 28. ! When Captain coo_c sa.Jed into x>otauy J_>ay ___ -ti.e of 1/ ii), and aaw tbe natives oi Australia tor tne , iu'st t.me, lie iiad not only completed a * journey or i_.,uihJ miles across t__e seas, but he had travelled backwards in time and caught a ghmpse ot tne world ias it was VJ,iA)O years ago. Tins state- : meat was made by bir Arthur Keitii, one of the world's most famous anthiopologists, at the Royal Institute, where me began a series of lectures this week on "Anthropological Problems of tne 'British Empire.'' ; He maintained that something mgre , should be known of the races tnat go .to make up the Empire. To understand • more of tne races included amongst the j millions of India, it was necessary first to study the people of many diverse •; parts of the world. They 'must work j from Australia towards India, from the j Islands of . the Malay Peninsula from j Mongolia in the north, and from Africa |in the south-west. Tne world has now been thoroughly'seai-o__ed for the living I races, and tbe tailed and other strange ; people reported by ancient travellers I had been proved to be a myth. Certain■j ly they had found .pygmies in Africa, . in the Philippines, and in New Guinea, but it was now recognised that they had no more significance amongst breeds of men than small types had amongst breeds of horses and dogs. They were merely by-products. As the result of the world-wide search, anthropologists had come to the conclusion that the 1600 millions of individuals which make up the population of the hiodern world, although they differed in feature, stature, colour, and qualities of brain, were the descendants of one common ancestry.

. But if the search for strange types amongst living races had now ended, that for fossil extinct types had just begun. ■ This search had proved more successful than people of a conventional way of thinking had really liked, for it was revealing a bygone world inhabited by types of humanity so repulsive to our modern standard of beauty that even their discoverers were not forward in claiming them as ancestors. The deeper we dug, the more ape-like did these fossil men become, and whether we liked them or not their existence had to be explained. There was only, one explanation: Darwin's theory was true, and somehow evolution had shaped all the modern races of mankind out of one of these extinct Simian-visaged stocks of humanity. Evolution was at a much greater pace to-day than ever before in the history of the world, and this was largely due to empire-building. The art of empire-building was not new, for 5000 years ago Egyptians and Assyrians were doing it. Later came the Greeks and the Romans. But the ancient em-pire-building was different from that of to-day. It was the conquest of people of equal development, and the" servants often absorbed the master. But when empire-buiiding began across the seas native populations of great continents had been swept arid replaced by human races of a totally different kind. The evolutionary wheel. which determinedthe fate of human races had moved forwards in three centuries with a jerk, ancl it was by displacement and replacement that the present tyne of man became spread abroad and reached the ends, of the earth. Sir Arthur Keith compared the'continent of Australia to a "raft which had floated away, with a people' very like the human race was 15,000 years" ago, and much nearer to the tvne of 'people who were the ancestors of the human race, and this raft had succeeded in floating down to the present day They represented humanity as it was before that most vital .factor in evolution was discovered—agriculture. The world was able to carry one or two people to the square mile when they subsisted on the natural products of the land. But with ff_ iCU ,re ** could carry as many as 500 to the square mile. There was every reason to believe that agriculture began in the valley of the Nile or on the plains ?L^ Sopotamia ' and Probably began 10,000 years ago. In England to-day we were changing coal into human beings and without agriculture and infusti^ Europe couid not carry more than 400,000 people. It was in Austraiia that we learnt how the human race lived long before men had to earn their livelihood by the sweat of the brow. In that country however, there vvere probably never more aboriginals than 250,000. The country was divided up into acknowledged sections, akin to our parishes, and the primitive men probably for thousands of years never went outside their acknowledged boundaries. Darwin observed these boundaries, and in Australia there was not a single record of the natives having broken out of their mvn special areas before the coming of the white man. This local grouping was a principle which governed all ra«a. of primitive man. Under these conditions they had worked out a most wonderful automatic government. The whole path of the native, from his birth to old age, was marked by customs which had S£ U ated and Pei'sisted .throughout 20,000 years. He could only describe the primitive form of government by saying they \.ere surrounded by an invisible cloud of witnesses, who controlled Jlf r act l? ns., from the cradle to the grave. Fmally nobody died naturally; they were killed by magic Scientists said Sir Arthur, had seen $ YT- ,Alii tra]wn- native traces of the Negroid, the Caucasian, and the Mon gohan types, aitf had concluded that cml oA S? 6 ori£nated from ™-tf heSe' r.But that was a complete S rat g' 1* ™s natural that these W« +yPf£ S*° uld some semblance to the Australian type, for the '' of 'Z ™% near?sh to the primitive type of man, from which, in the course of evolut.on, these others sprang. In quite recent years discoveries had bee* STdV which throw some light on the origin r gmes. Four years ago a fossil human skull found in Queensland was descrSS versftv %t' &mth A* S *dney Uni+b£v ii^ 6re COTlld be ao <*oubt that this skull is a primitive form of the Australian or Tasmanian type, nor could there be hesitation in assigning it to a Kfr y nnaT ent date~?«e represfntedin ™PetX- a. phase of the age. liie British colonist was the product or endless generations of industrial jelectjon. Not. only his knowlSge but the inborn aptitudes of his brail gave wfrt.^ 6 P°we', to make a land blossom with farms, villages, and cities, where a handful of aborigines could scarce 7Tv* W 0? 3- No lhe Australian black shrank from our European civihsation, for we asked him tc ascend a ladder at a single stride which had taken us 10,000 years to scramble