IN THE DAWN OF LIFE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20792, 7 February 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

IN THE DAWN OF LIFE.

ANCIENT IVORY.

BY T. L. BIRKS.

One would not suppose, to look at them, that they were in any way remarkable —just a handful of sharp pieces of ivory, each about an inch long. Close inspection reveals them to be teeth—sharks' teeth, in fact. Though slightly tinged with yellow, they are in a state of perfect preservation, and at a guess one would be inclined to place their age at about three or four years. And there one would be wrong. For, compared with the age of those teeth, the antiquity of the ruins at Stonehengo pales into insignificance, and the age-old city of Tompeii becomes a thing of yesterday. For they are old, those little 'pieces of ivory, with an antiquity so incredibly vast that the finite human mind is utterly incapable of grasping anything but a faint conception of it. Their history stretches far away down the endless corridors of time, to a day in the era known to modern geology as the Silurian Period, some sixty million years ago. Could there have been anyone on earth at that time, he would have seen it as a spectacle of utter desolation, a barren and solitary waste of shifting sands. Here and there along the coasts a sparse growth of vegetation managed to exist, but over the whole remaining surface of the globe not even a blade of grass could have been found, nor was the deathly, brooding silence of that all but lifeless world broken by so much as the chirp of a single cricket. Unlike the land, the sea, aptly named " the mother of all," had been the abode of life probably for several million years before this period. Most of the marine lifo was very different from that of to-day, but small sharks, possibly the first true fish to appear, were present at that time, the species having remained practically unchanged ever since. Owing to the gradual upheaval of the land mass which is now North Africa, the ocean receded to the north and west, but much of it remained to form an inland sea between the Sahara Desert and the sea-coast. This gradually dried up, and the fish it contained, which must have been packed literally like sardines in the shallow water, perished in countless millions, layers of them many feet in thickness stretching for nearly a thousand miles. In time sand from the vast desert in the interior drifted over these remains, forming a protective covering. Older than New Zealand. Aeons passed, during which the evolution of the earth progressed with infinite slowness. While the continents were still undergoing vast structural changes, plant life gained a strong foothold, and was soon joined in the struggle for existence by the first representatives of the animal kingdom'. But, whereas that occurred many millions of years back, it was probably not until about five hundred thousand years ago that there appeared on the earth the first creatures who could rightly be tailed human beings. At last, with modern civilisation came scientific agriculture and the demand for fertilisers. And so it came about that, buried beneath the sand-hills of Morocco were found vast deposits of phosphate, actually the remains of the fishes that perished on that far-off Silurian day, transformed during the passing ages into a fine powder. This is now shipped to many parts of the world, including this country, where the farmer is helped in the growing of his crops by all that is left of those sharks which lived long before New Zealand emerged from the primeval sea. Only the hard, durable teeth of the fishes have resisted decomposition, and they are to be found among the phosphate .in largo numbers. One of the most remarkable things about them is the fact that they have not undergone the process of petrifaction which changes most pre-historic remains into mere pieces of solid silica. Those teeth are real ivory, just as strong and sharp as they ever were. Stupendous Age. In order to gain even a faint idea of their stupendous age it is necessary to take some known period as a standard. Take, for instance, six thousand years. During that time much has happened. Egyptian monarchs watched their thousands of toiling slaves raise their mighty pyramids and carve the Sphinx's enigmatic face. Osvmandias, Tutankhamen and Solomon " in all his glory " came, left their monuments to the world, and passed on. Babylon's enormous walls, more than three hundred feet high and eighty-five feet thick, were raised with infinite labour. Rome and Greece rose to the summit of their power and crumbled into the dust. Then came Britain's turn, and in less than two thousand years she has risen from a few tribes of painted savages to bo the greatest powar in the world to-day. But all those scores of centuries, from Ihe era of primitive tools and weapons to that of aeroplanes and poison gas, occupy only one ten-thousandth part of the life of thoso ancient fossils. To take another illustration: Let their age be represented by the past twentyfour hours, which conclude at the moment you are reading this. Then on that scale, though the sharks lived twentyfour hours ago, less than three seconds have elapsed since the beginning of the Christian era; the earliest civilisation appeared about twelve seconds ago; and man has been on the earth in the vicinity of twelve minutes. Transient Human Life.

Looking at these relics of another age, ono realises with appalling clearness how transient is human life. Consider Babylon, for instance. At the zenith of its power it was tho most magnificent city in the world, tho capital of a vast and powerful empire. Yet where is it now ? A few heaps of rubble scattered over a barren plain is all that remains of its titanic walls and splendid palaces. But while empires roso and fell, while

Sultim after Sultan, with his pomp, Abode his hour or two and went his way,

thoso little pieces of ivory, insignificant and unnoticed, outlasted them all. Perhaps, when a few more million years havo passed and man, with all 'his vain hopes and fleeting triumphs, has passed for ever from the face of the earth, some of them may still bo defying the ages.> When tho Sphinx has long since succumbed to the attacks of the elements, when the British Empire has gone the way of all empires, and when rolling seas cover the place where New York's skyscrapers now stand, they may still be there, steadfast in a wOrld of change, symbolic of the eternal.