SCIENTISTS DIFFER.

Waipa Post, Volume XXI, Issue 1339, 9 January 1923, Page 2

SCIENTISTS DIFFER.

ANCIENT TOOTH FOUND., PREHISTORIC MAX OR BEAR? At a scientific meeting of the Zoological Society in London. Professor Elliot Smith exhibited photographs and a cast, recently received from America, of what is now a famous fossil tooth. As Professor Elliott Smith stated last May, the specimen was found by Mi- Harold J. Cook in beds of Pliocene age in Nebraska, where other remains of extinct mammals, some apparently with Asiatic affinities, have been discovered. At'-, ter taking the opinion of various American experts, Professor H. F. Osborn, the leading paleontologist of America, identified it as a second upper molar of a creature certainly belonging to the group of Primates, but neither an prang, gorilla, chimpanzee nor any known race of extinct man or man like ape. If this identification be accepted, then, for. the time being, America can lay claim to have been the home of the oldest ape like man, or man 'like ape, yet discovered. Dr Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at the British Museum of Natural History, however, has already stated his doubts of the interpretation, holding that the tooth showed a close resemblance with the last lower molar of extinct primitive bears belonging to the genus Hyaenarctos. creatures of which fos.su remains, although unfortunately not including a las. lower molar, bad already been discov. •-d j. n American Pliocene beds.

Professor Elliot Smith fully admitted the unexpectedness of finding a large primate in the lower pliocene of America representing a type of the human race e,,<\w rhan pithecanthropus, the fossil man of .Java. But .)». going through the characters 01 .'«• tooth one by one. and. above all. on examining photographs taken by Xrays, which showed the configuration of the pulp cavity, he was disposed to agree that it made known to us the existence of a primate, in some respects like the chimpanzee, but definitely human rather than ape like. Dr Smith Woodward adhered to his opinion that it was more likely to belong to the known genera of extinct bears than to an unknown primate in a continent which had not yet yielded any remains of such creatures. He might have been wrong in thinking it a molar from the lower jaw but he claimed that it was much more like the upper molar of a varnivore than of a primate.