PARALLEL EVOLUTION

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19131, 28 September 1936, Page 12

PARALLEL EVOLUTION

ORIGIN OF THE RACES 9 SIR KEITH'S NEW THEORY LONDON, July 29. A new theory of the origin of the modem races of mankind was put forward by Sir Arthur Keith, the eminent anthropologist, in an address before a learned society in London. Hitherto, he said, anthropologists had believed that modern races, black. brown, white, and yellow, had evolved from a common mid-Pleistocene ancestral stock, but recent discoveries in were compelling them to recast their ideas. They were now tempted to believe that by the beginning of the Pleistocene period, some 500.000 years ago, the ancestors of the Mongol, of the Australian, and of the Negro, were already in occupation of the continental areas 'now inhabited by their descendants, and that, after separation, each race underwent a similar series of parallel changes, such as the reduction of tooth and jaw, the enlargement of the brain, and the replacement of simian by human markings. In support of this theory. Sir Arthur Keith adduced Mongolian, Australian, and negro characteristics, observed by him in the skulls respectively of Sinanthropus /from China,. Pithecanthropus from Java, and Kanam Man fronl East Africa. WORKING THEORIES It was clear, he said, that they had reached a point which compelled them to reorientate their working theories. Only when they accepted the independent evolution of the races of mankind during the whole period of the Pleistocene period could they give a coherent explanation of the known facts. Such a view deepened the mystery of human evolution, for it implied that, as in the past, the future of each race lay in its genetic constitution. Throughout the Pleistocene period, the separated branches of the human family appeared to have been unfolding a programme of latent qualities inherited from a common ancestor of an earlier period.

"Wo., too." lie said in conclusion, "have our inherited programme of latent qualities which the future will unfold if our descendants survive. This is not altogether a fatalistic creed, for we perceive that the unfolding in the future need not be strictly confined to the latent programme. Nature retains the right of introducing into it new and unexpected items."