PRE-DAWN MAN.

Waikato Times, Volume 103, Issue 17410, 24 May 1928, Page 13

PRE-DAWN MAN.

ASIAN EXPEDITION SEARCH TOOTH 1,000,000 YEARS OLD. (From a Peking Correspondent.) An attempt to shed fresh light on the origin of man will be made by the Central Asialic Expedition, which, under the auspices of tiie American Museum of Natural History, lias set out from Peking on a six months’ exploration of Inner Mongolia. There have been three previous expeditions under similar auspices. Each has made a palaeontological study of Outer Mongolia its chief concern with a view to testing out the theory that the whole Central Asian plateau was originally a great centre of mammalian life. The leader of the expedition, Mr Roy Chapman Andrews, feels that this has now been established sufficiently, and he proposes this year to investigate the fossil deposits of Inner Mongolia for traces of what he calls “the predawn man.” "We believe," Mr Andrews told me. “that what we have proved true in the case of mammals and reptiles is likely to prove true in the case of man also. We think that man originated in this region because it was the type of country which would best encourage his development. It is unlikely that he ever originated in the tropics or In forested country, for life there Is too easy, and in a day he could gather enough food to last him a week. But up on this high, sparsely forested plateau, with its exhilarating climate, he was’ faoed with a healthy struggle for existence that tended to Induce development. These conditions we have demonstrated to have existed in Mongolia for millions of years, and so we are going to specialise this year in searching for primitive man. In the past ten years enormous advances have been made in our knowledge of human ancestry. Every discovery tends to push man’s origin farther and farther back into the past. The human race unquestionably is very much more ancient than was supposed a while back. A decade ago palaeontologists would have said it was impossible to And human remains in the old deposits we are going to search in Inner Mongolia this year, but we know now that they are not too old. We shall go through them with a flne-tooth comb to sec if there is any trace of this predawn man we are looking for. Search for Human Fossils. “We know it is a gamble, for human remains are much more fragile than animal fossils, and man, even at that early age, was intelligent enough to avoid being caught in quicksands and bogs. If we do find anything in the way of human relics there it will be very ancient —so ancient that it will not be man-like. It will be right in the human stem, ape-like, but showing in the teeth some human characteristics. We shall work first in a large area of deposits about miles northwest of Kalgan, on the edge of the Gobi, Desert, where the land is cut up into ravines and gullies.” The expedition’s new line of inquiry into the origin of man received a definite stimulus from the discovery in 1926 of two evidently human teeth in a cave deposit a few miles outside Peking. These teeth, which are believed to be extremely old, apparently belonged to a child about eight years of age. They were found as the result of investigations conducted by Dr. J. G. Andersson, Swedish adviser to the Chinese Geoiogical Survey. Another tooth was found there last summer, and is now being exhibited in Europe and in America by Dr. Davidson Black, of the Rockefeller Institute in Peking, who has written an exhaustive treatise on the “Sinanthropus,” or “Peking Man.” According to Mr Andrews, this looth is “quite the most important human relic in existence. It is certainly as old as the Java Ape Man (Pithecanthropus Erectus) and any other human relic known. Probably if is the oldest known. The tooth is of such a primitive type that it seems tc be directly in the line of human ancestry, whereas things like the Java Ape Man evidently were offshoots that died out. We know that tills tooth is old, owing to the geological structure ’n which it was found and because of the types of fossils with which it was associated. One Million Years. “This Peking Man,” Dr. Andrews declared, “is certainly a million years old. We are looking for a two-miilion-year-oid man. it is the pre-dawn man we are after, and if we find him the Piltdown controversy will be a Sunday school picnic compared with the scientific discussion that will result. If we get any type of human remains whatever in these old strata it will decide whether we are monkeys or an independent creation.”