NEW CHAPTER OPENED

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18589, 27 December 1934, Page 5

NEW CHAPTER OPENED

PREHISTORIC LIFE

AMAZING DISCOVERIES

200,000-YEAR-OLD RELICS

(Elec. Tel. Copyright—United Press Assn.) LONDON, Dec. 25.

Delving into the caverns of Mount Carmel, Palestine, which men inhabited 200,000 years ago, an expedition comprising members of tho British School of Archaeology and the American School of Prehistoric Research, were rewarded bv discoveries opening the most remote chapter in the evolution of prehistoric man yet disclosed. Mr. Theodore McCown who is cooperating with Sir Arthur Keith in examining the expedition’s specimens at the Royal College of Surgeons, told the News-Chronicle that the Palestine discoveries included a cave inhabited almost continuously for 50,000 years, iu which ■ was the best neanderthal skeleton ever found, also the skeletons of a man aged 30, a girl of 3A- years, and a woman of 25 years. Mr. McCown says these people were more progressive than the previous neanderthals who were an unsatisfactory experiment in nature’s evolutionary process. The male skeletons, he said, had chins but the woman’s skeleton was chinless.

A story of countless centuries was revealed as the scientists excavated one cave, layer after layer to a depth of 25ft. The remains of a hippopotamus, crocodile, rhinoceros, elephant, wolf, gazelle, rats and mice were found among flints and pottery of the bronze age, but these were absent in tiie lower layers.

Mr. McCown believes that the discoveries show that the Palestinian cultures were allied with the African cultures on the one hand, and with Asiatic and European cultures on the other. Modem man, he says, evolved from an intermedite typo which followed tho neanderthals.