DESCENT OF MAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LVI, Issue 17254, 2 September 1919, Page 5

DESCENT OF MAN.

THE PREHISTORIC AGE,

LECTURE BY MR, J. A. BARTRUM.

Various interesting aspects of the geological history and the cultural development of man were considered by Mr. J. A. Bartrum, lecturer in geology at the Auckland University College,' in addressing the Auckland Institute. in St. Andrew's Hall last evening. The lecturer said that the key to man's origin was furnished by evolution -from lower animals. His nearest relatives were anthropoid apes such as : the • gorilla and the chimpanzee, ; and general opinion favoured the view that some ancestral type of anthropoid "gave rise to man along one evolutional branch, and. to* anthropoid apes alon.fr another. The discovery in Java in 1891 of fossil remains of an animal intermediate between ■ man and apes perhaps supplied the "missing link." That animal has been called»pithecanthropus and it existed many hundreds of thousands of years ago. v " The history of mag, in Europe," said the speaker, " begins during part of the past Great Ice- Age, when hordes ; of mammals, many now foreign to Europe, and others now extinct, roamed over the lowlands of the continent. Geologists are able to subdivide the Ice Age into four main periods, and thus obtain a chronology of man's evolution. The earliest man of Europe is the ape-like Heidelberg man, . represented solely by a lower jaw found in 1909 near Heidelberg in deposits formed during the Second interglacial period." Mr. Bartrum then outlined the various types of man, and described their physical peculiarities anß manners of living, as indicated by discoveries of bones, flint tools, and carvings. -He traced the line of descent from the Piltdown era ,to the Neanderthals—a degenera f s off-shoot from the direct line Qf descent, who disappeared 25,000 years ago— tb-a Cro Maghons, a superior ■ race physically and intellectually. Thi6 race, said the speaker, was the most interesting of the early Stone Age period. Their art, which finished a delightful study, was seen in sculpture and in engraving upon the walls of grottoes, in wall paintings, and even in modelling in clay. ■ Contemporary animals furnished the subjects, ana their outlines were truly delineated!" The colouring of some of the paintings «as particularly fine. After Magdalenian times new j races supplanted the Cro Magnons, and art practically disappeared for the rest of the old Stone Age.