20,000 YEARS AGO

Otago Witness, Issue 3556, 9 May 1922, Page 41

20,000 YEARS AGO

ROMANCE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION. THE PAST AS SEEN IN AUSTRALIA. OUR ANCESTORS. (From Our Own Correspondent.) When Oaptain Cook sailed into Botany Bay and saw hte natives of Australia for the first time, he had not only completed a journey of 12,000 miles across the seas but he had travelled backwards in time and caught a glimpse of the world as it was 12,000 years ago. This statement- was made by Sir Arthur Keith one of the world’s most famous anthropologists, at the Royal Institution where he began a series of lectures this week on “Anthropological Problems of the British Empire.” He 'maintained that something more should be known of the races that go to make up the .Empire. To understand more of the races included amongst the millions of India it wai necessary first to study the people of many diverse parts of the world. They must work from Australia towards India, from the Islands of the Malay Peninsula, from Mongolia in the north, and from. Africa in the south-west. The world has now been thoroughly searched for the living raxes, and the tailed and other strange people reported by ancient travellers had been proved to be a myth. Certainly they had found pygmies in Africa, in the Philippines, and in New Guinea, but it was now recognised that they had no moi% significance amongst breeds of men than small types had amongst breeds of horses and dogs. They were merely by-products. As the result of the world-wide search anthropologists had come to Jhe conclusion that the 1600 millions of individuals which made up the population of the modern world, although they differed in feature, stature, colour, and qualities of brain, were the descendants of one common ancestry. But if the search for strange types amongst living races had how ended, that for fossil extinct types had just begun. This search had proved more successful than people of a conventional way of thinking had really liked, for it was revealing a bygone world inhabited by types of humanity so repulsive to our modern standard of beauty that even their discoverers were not forward in claiming them as ancestors. The deeper we dug the more apelike did these fossil men become, and whether we liked them or not, t.heir existence had to be explained. There was oniy one explanation : Darwin’s theory was true, and somehow evolution had shaped all the modem races of mankind out of one of these extinct.. Simian-visaged stocks of humanity. EVOLUTION IN A HURRY. Evolution was proceeding at a much greater pace to-day than ever before in the history of the world, and this was largely due to Empire building. The art of empire building was not new, for 5000 years ago Egyptians and Assyrians were doing it. Later came the Greeks and. the Romans. But the ancient empire building was different from that of to-day. It was ihe conquest of people of equal development and the servants often absorbed the -master. But when Empire-building began across the seas native populations of great continents had been swept and replaced by human races of a totally different kind. The evolutionary wheel which determined the fate of human races had moved forwards in these centuries with a jerk, arid it was by displacement and replacement that the present type of man became spread abroad and reached the ends of the earth. Sir Arthur Keith compared the continent of Australia to a raft which had floated away, with a people very like the human race was 15,000 years ago, and much nearer to the type of people who were the ancestors of the human race, and this raft had succeeded in floating dpwn to the present day. They represented humanity aS it was before that most vital factor in evolution was discovered —agriculture. The world was able to carry one or two people to the square mile when they subsisted on the natural products of the land. But with agriculture it could carry as many as 500 to the square mile. There was every reason to believe that agriculture began in the valley of the Nile or on the plains of Mesopotamia, and probably began 10.000 years ago. In England to-day we were changing coal into human beings, and without agriculture and industry Europe could not carry more than 400,060 people. AUTOMATIC GOVERNMENT. It was in Australia that we learnt how the human .race lived long before men hod to earn their livelihood by the sweat of the brow. In that country, however, there were probably never more aborigines than Zov.OoU. The country was divided up into acknowledged sections, akin to our parishes, and the primitive men probably for thousands of years never went outside their acknowledged boundaries. Darwin observed these boundaries, and in Australia there was not a single record of the natives having broken out of their own special areas before the coming of white man. This local grouping was a principle which •d all races of primitive man. Linder tht-i conditions they had worked out a , I wonderful automatic government-. The - ~9. path of the native from his birth ■ ’ age was marked by customs which and persisted throughout years. He could only describe: this mitive form of government by saying ;:it were surrounded by an invisible cloud of witnesses who controlled their actions from the cradle to the grave. Finally, ■i i dv died naturally; they were killed by mag iq.

Scientists, said Sir Arthur, had seen in the Australian native traces of the Negroid, the Caucasian, and the Mongolian type, and had concluded that the Australian native originated from one of these. But that was a complete misreading. It was natural that these other types should bear some resemblance to the Australian type, for the latter was nearest to the primitive type of man, from which in the course of evolution these others sprang. In quite recent years discoveries had been made which throw some light on the origin and antiquity of the Australian aborigines. Four years ago a fossil human skull found in Queensland was uescribed by Dr S. A. Smith, of Sydney University. There could be no doubt that this skull is a primitive form of the Australian or Tasmanian type, nor could there be hesitation in assigning it to a very ancient date—one represented in Europe bv a phase of the ice age. The British colonist was the product of endless generations of industrial selection. Not only his knowledge, but the inborn aptitudes of his brain, gave him the power to make a land blossom with farms, villages, and cities where a handful of aborigines could scarce scrape a livelihood. No wonder the’ Australian black shrank from our European civilisation, for we asked him to ascend a ladder at a single stride which ha- taken us 10,000 years to scramble up.