WHERE MAN FIRST LIVED

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 30 November 1927, Page 2

WHERE MAN FIRST LIVED

CENTRAL ASIA PROBABLE Scientists are speculating at what part on the earth's surface man had his origin. "Man represents such a- new departure," says Professor J. A. Thomson, in the "Empire Review" for August, "that the hypothesis of several Edens for his emergence seems to be unlikely." Professor Thomson says that many more data must be accumulated before any secure answer is possible. Dr. W. K. Gregory, an eminent authority, has been advocating the claims of Central /Asia. This view supports the remarkable prophecy made in 1900 by Professor Henry Pairfield Osborn, of the New York Museum of History, that Northern Asia would prove to be "the palaeontological Garden, of Eden." He thought that from this area the great reptiles rose and spread over the earth, and that here mammals first had their being. It was to test these views that his museum sent out the welhequipped expeditions under Dr. Andrews which made amazing discoveries of vast saurian monsters, and the even more remarkable discovery of the first-known mammal—the family to which man belongs—an animal about three inches long. Europe has some early approximations to modern man in a pliocene primate "Dryopithecus rheuanus," and in the Piltdown and Heidleberg remains. The geological strata of the Lower Oligocene 'period excavated in Egypt lias also representatives of the man-anthropoid series. Yet there seems much to be said for finding Eden in "Central Asia. Perhaps Pithecanthropus, the ape-man of Java, and the owners of the Wadjak and Talgai (Queensland) skulls werefarwandering offshoots from the Asiatic 'centre. Perhaps, the Nebraskan tooth also represents a migrant from Central Asia. "Speaking of teeth,".says Professor Thomson, "we must allow some importance to the discovery fir 1921 of two human teeth in a cave at Chcu Koutien, south-west of Pekin, for the age indicated is the beginning of the geological age, the Pleistocene/ which precedes our own. Very early traces of human culture have also been discovered by Dr. Andrews and his party in the Gobi" Desert. At the period at which msn emerged the Central Asian plateau was rising. The extreme dryness of the Gobi desert, the scene of recent discoveries,- is the reason why ancient remains have been wonderfully preserved.