BLOOD RELATIONS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 19999, 5 January 1935, Page 5

BLOOD RELATIONS

MONKEYS AND HUMANS RESULTS OF TESTS If blood is thicker than water, the monkeys of the old world have a special claim on human indulgence. A young English scientist, Dr S. Zuckerman, has proved that the blood serum of old world monkeys is more like that of human beings than it is like any monkeys in the new world. This was one of the discoveries announced before the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnographical Sciences at University College, London. It means, according to the experts, that the human and ape stocks must have parted company a very long time ago—not less, Dr Zuckerman suggested to a representative of the “Morning Post,” than 10,000,000 years ago. The reason is that this wide divergence between the monkeys of the new and old worlds implies a very long period of independent volution. On the other hand, the common characteristics of man and the old world monkeys must, it is believed, have been independently acquired. This is a possibility which has also been emphasied at the Congress in regard to other aspects of human evolution. It is more and more being realised that nature can produce apparently similar results in different ways. Dr Zuckerman formerly worked at the London Zoo. He has spent the past two years at Yale University, and is now to work at Oxford. Where Facts are Found His comparison depends on a discovery, made more than thirty years ago by Professor Nuttall, at Cambridge that there are differences between the types of “protein” found in the blood serum (the clear part of the blood) of different animals. Professor Nuttall’s technique has now been adapted for numerical comparisons, and has also been applied in medicolegal tests in which it has been vital to prove that a particular blood stain is of human origin. Other scientists have been using the better-known blood groups, which depend on the coagulation of the blood cells of one individual by the serum of another, to track down the racial migrations of long ago. The more familiar use of these groups is as a preliminary to blood transfusion* operations. Professor Ruggles Gates (London), for example, reported that the proportion of different blood groups found in the inhabitants of some of the islands off the extreme north-east of Asia confirmed the theory that the American Indians had once migrated across a narrow land connection from Asia. Bushman, Maoris, Hottentots, and Lapps were among the other “peripheral” peoples whose blood, classified in this way, was reported on. Cause of Confusion But apart from merely local comparisons it appears that the much vaunted blood group system of classification is landing the scientists in difficulties. Six Groups Formerly there were four blood groups, now there are six. And Dr Landsterner, of the Rockefeller Institute, who started race classification in this way, believes that he can recognise more than fifty different blood characteristics. European peoples in which “Group A” predominates need no longer, it appears, be ashamed of any apparent connection with the aborigines of Australia. Professor H. J. Fleure, of Manchester, brought the use of “detective” methods nearer home. He had been discovering relics of three different races of early invaders among the present population of the Isle of Man. Incidentally, he reported that as the result of wide inquiries on the island, there were “perhaps a score of people who still spoke Manx and a few more who understood it.” They came chiefly from the south-west, where he found the earliest of his old races. This is a people with dark hair and eyes and long heads. He believes they are associated with the great stone monuments of prehistoric times found in the island, and they are probably the earliest race which can still be identified in Britain. Ancient Men Next in the Manx Museum, but established with a little less certainty, is a people who, although dark, are broad-headed. They are similar to types found in the north-west of Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, and may have been the people who introduced the Celtic language into Britain about 500 B.C. These people are now mostly found in the extreme south of the island. In the extreme north Professor Fleure found his third race, clear descendants of the tall, blonde, long-haired Norse invaders of about the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. Altogether some 1200 islanders have been pressed into service. They are all men. Professor Fleure has no use for women in such a survey. He states that they stop developing at too early an age. Professor Arnold Toynbee (London) deplored “the devastating effects of the reckless world adoption of the West European principle of nationality.” “The Near Eastern peoples,” he said, “have been led to scrap their own indigenous political institutions and to substitute our own Western nationalism in its place. “It is this that explains the havoc that has followed. When you apply the West European concept of nationality to a region* in which the different communities are geographically intermingled and economically independent, and teach each one of them that it has a right to possess a sovereign independent State on the pattern of France or England, you are really inciting them to sort themselves out by a process of internecine warfare in which all minorities will be evicted or massacred.