PRIMITIVE MAN

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21769, 7 April 1934, Page 2 (Supplement)

PRIMITIVE MAN

OLD CAVE DWELLINGS STILL INHABITED TO-DAY SKELETONS OF DISTANT PAST British and American excavators working side by side in Palestine have discovered a scries of caves in Mount Carniel, which show continuous human occupation from roughly 100,000 years ago up till Biblical times, and so through the Arab period to the present day. The oldest complete human skeletons from any part of the world, which go back to about 75,000 years ago. and wore found in these caves,, are being cleaned and scraped in the Royal College of Surgeons. Skulls and human jawbones of the period are being exhibited in the British Museum, together with a solitary and broken human thigh-bone 90,000 years old, which represents the oldest human remains yet found in Palestine. Further back than that only stone implements have yet been discovered to tell us of Palestine's earliest inhabitants. The field director of the joint expedition of Ihn British School of Archieology in Jerusalem and the American School of Prehistoric Research is Miss Dorothy Garrod, the daughter of Sir Archibald Garrod, F.R.S., formerly Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford. She has been out to the caves each season for the past six years. Among her assistants have been Mrs. Christopher Hawkes, the daughter of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, the president of the Royal Society, and Mr. Theodore MoOowii, a young American excavator, who was in charge when the first of the complete skeletons was uncovered.

A Favourite Cavo Tlio si to of tho cnvc.s is tlio Wady a 1-Miirliam (Valley of the Caves) at tho western foot of Mount Carmel, Tniilos south of Haifa, and looking over tho Plain of Sharon to the sea. They were inhabited from the Old Stone Ago 11 p to tho present day. Miss Garrod said her house-boy was born in one, and lives in one to-day, a very favourite cavo among goat-herds, since the people of the valley believe that a goat stabled them will have twins. Among the finds is a Hellenistic terra-cotin of Venus, perhaps the finest Greek object yet found in Palestine. About 4000 8.C., roughly a millenium before Abraham, these caves were inhabited by a people of tho Middle Stone Age, for whom tho name Natufian has been adopted. They seem to have settled there about 8000 years earlier, and one can now see in tho British Museum specimens of their art, small carvings in tho round. These Natufians were men and women rather like ourselves, but perhaps of rather slighter and shorter build. When they smiled they must have shown a conspicuous gap in their upper jaw, as the two front teeth were removed while they wore children. They reaped corn with their sickles, and may even have ground it in tlio curious circular basins they hollowed out of the solid rock. Evidence of Cannibalism They do not seem to have had pottery or to havo domesticated animals, but wo havo tho barbed harpoons and pointed weapon-tips with which they fished and hunted. Sonic of them, at least, seem to have been cannibals', for skulls have been found with fragments neatly chopped out as if to get at tho brains. In levels below this the excavators came to other and older races known as tho Aurignacian and Mousterian, who used stone implements of different types. While Aurignacian man was superficially of tho modern type, Mousterian man was tall and muscular, with massive jaws and a forward jutting face. Above his eyes was a lidge of bone much thicker and more prominent than even tho most primitive and brutal-looking of modern mankind. The woman had a slender, chinloss lower jaw. Oldest Skeletons

The four Moustorian skeletons fouml complete are the oldest human skeletons discovered anywhere in the world, though fragments' of skulls or jaws of greater antiquity from China, Java. Kenya, and even from Sussex give us it less detailed picture of a still earlier mankind. There is only a single thighhone to show what typo preceded Moustcrian Man in what is called the Achenleo-Mou.sterian period of ralesline.

In the Anrignacian and Tipper Mousteriaii periods, when Europe was covered with glaciers, Palestine, was warm and rainy, a pleasant land with large rivers and forest-clad hills. Earlier still, at the time of Europe's last interglacial period, Palestine was the home of tho buffulo, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the. wart-hog, the crocodile and tho soft-shelled river-turtle, all of whom have left fragments which arc now displayed at tho British Museum.