AT CIVILISATION’S DAWN

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 29 October 1928, Page 7

AT CIVILISATION’S DAWN

IN THE GOBI DESERT Men armed with weapons of stone and women adorned with the spoils of the hunt lived 20,000 years ago in what, is now the Gobi Desert, relicts discovered by the Central Asiatic expedition led by Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews indicate (says an Associated I’rcss massage from Peiping, China-, to the “Christian Science Monitor”). Thousands of relics • showed the numerous phases of the Stone Age culture to which these dune dwellers had attained. Traces of human beings dating back 150,000 years had beejn found previously in the same district. “These people wore wonderfully clever,” Dr. Andrews said. “They lived apparently in a transition period between the old and now stone ages. Tho countryside, was saturated with people, and they bunted and fished in the lakes and streams, and built shelters on the dunes of skins, bark, and timbers. There are great areas of traces of these people, who lived thereabouts for thousands of years.” At the time they lived in the area it was a fertile land, with trees and lakes and plentiful annual rainfall. Crude implements showed that man was beginning to ceacb with stone results which he formerly accomplished with hands. Bones indicated that the race subsisted chiefly on birds and frogs. There wore traces of a breed of horses and asses, indicating that they used beasts of ’burden. Women wore necklaces of fox teeth and; bone rings on thoir fingers or in t-heir ears. lor weapons, the men bad stone knives and arrow and spear heads of flint and agate. They pierced these with stone drills.