PREHISTORIC CAVES

Northern Advocate, 27 December 1934, Page 5

PREHISTORIC CAVES

PALESTINE RESEARCH. REMARKABLE SPECIMENS. NEANDERTHAL SKELETON. (Received 12.30 p.m.) LONDON, December 25. Delving into .caverns at Mt. Carmel, Palestine, which men inhabited 200,000 years ago, an expedition comprising members of the British School of Archaeology and the America School of Prehistoric. Research was rewarded by discoveries which open the most remote . chapter yet disclosed of the evolution of prehistoric man.

Mr Theodore McCown, who is operating with Sir Alexander Keith in examining the expedition’s specimens at the Royal College of Surgeons, told the “News Chronicle” that the Palestine discoveries included a cave inhabited almost continually for 50,000 years, in which was the best Neanderthal skeleton ever found, also skeletons of a man aged 30, a girl 3£ and a woman 25. Mr McCown says that these people were more progressive than previous Neanderthals, who were an unsatisfactory experiment in nature’s evolutionary process. The male skeletons had chins, while those of the woman and girl were chinless. The story of countless centuries was revealed as scientists excavated one cave, layer after layer, to a depth of 25 feet. The remains of a hippopotamus, of a crocodile, rhinocerous, an elephant, wolf, gazelle, rats and mice were found among the flints and pottery of the bronze Age, but these were absent in the lower layers.

Mr McCown believes the discoveries show that prehistoric Palestine cultures were allied to African cultures on the one hand and to Asiatic and European cultures on the other. Modern man evolved from an intermediate type which followed the Neanderthals.