HAVE WE THE MISSING LINK ?

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVIII, Issue XX, 15 May 1897, Page 618

HAVE WE THE MISSING LINK ?

It is confidently asserted in a most readable article in the Illustrated Magazine that the * missing link ’ —that long sought individual who is expected to prove the development of man from monkey—has at last been found. The Herald made the announcement at the time, but here are some interesting particulars. The spot was a ravine in the island of Java, and the discoverer was a Dutch scientist, by the name of Dr. Dnbois. Dr. Dubois was searching in the tertiary formations that occur in Java—formations that from an ordinary human point of view are ot extreme antiqnity, but which, from a geologist’s point of view, are but the more recently formed lawyers of the earth’s crnst—and finding numerous fossils of extinct kinds of buffaloes, antelopes, deer, hyenas, pigs, anteaters and crocodiles, when he unearthed, mingled with them, the fossil remains of what has proved to be an ancestor of the human race. THE SPOT. The features of the district in which the find was made are worthy of note. A good

map of Java will show a small stream, the Bengawan, rising in the hills near the centre of the island and flowing its short course through flat, malarious country, covered with rice fields, northward to the Java Sea. Where this stream leaves the hills it runs between steep banks, thirty to forty feet in height. It was in the bottom layer of those steep banks that Dr. Dubois found the fossil remains. He was urging on his Javanese coolies, picturesque in their short, kiltlike sarongs and quaint head attires, to make haste before the rains stopped their operations, when there were quarried out from the fossiliferous layer, side by side with the bones of extinct animals, a tooth and the roof of a skull, evidences of a manlike being which must have coexisted with those extinct kinds of animals. The rains put a stop to Dr. Dubois’ explorations, but in the following dry season be returned to the fossiliferons layer, and, some yards from the site of his former find, unearthed another tooth and a thigh bone. These four parts certainly belonged to the same kind of animal, and the fact that they were found so closely together makes it likely they are parts of the same individual. These four parts are all we have to reconstruct the missing link from, but they are sufficient for the purpose. Now, what sort of beings were those old world fellows of tertiary times ’ If this specimen may be taken as fairly representative, and there is every reason to take it as snch, they were surprisingly like ourselves. It was a piece of rare good fortune that the thigh bone was found, for no other bone can indicate so much to us with certainty. So perfectly human is it that it might belong to a London lady. It informs ns in unmistakable terms that the human body was mncb then as it is now, thoroughly adapted for walking easily and jauntily erect. It assures us the foot was as our feet, legs as our legs, body as our body, and hands and arms approximately like our hands and arms. The roof of the skull and teeth allow ns grounds enough not only to reconstruct with a considerable approach to truth the outline of the head, bnt to tell much of the character of these antique folk. They were beetle-browed, with sharply receding foreheads, with ears placed nearer the crown of the head than is nowadays the case, and in all probability with the wide winged pug-noses of Australians. EXCELLENT REASONS. They must have been people of no mean mental capacity. The skull cap indicates room for a brain of 1,000 cubic centimetres, a brain three-fonrths the size of an average European brain, but quite as large as the brains of many Australians, and twice the size of any anthropoid ape's. But from the skull we can learn much more of the nature of the tertiary man than that. The complete absence of bony ridges for the attachment of the biting muscles informs us with certainty that the tusklike canines, or eyeteeth, that give the mouths of gorillas, chimpanzees and orangs such a murderous appearance, had already become small and in perfect series with the other teeth, as in ns. That means tertiary man had reached a high point in evolution. It means he had shed the ferocity of his nature, and relied not upon his great canines as means of defence. against bis enemies, bnt upon his cunning and power of adapting means to ends. The molar teeth are large, and ground somewhat with the rough food of savages ; but except in size they are in nowise peculiar. Whether they possessed articular speech we cannot as yet say, bnt the discovery of a lower jaw might set this at rest, for it carries the imprint of certain of the speech muscles. Of his attainments and degree of civilization we know nothing. But it is only right to state here that in a conglomerate formation in North Burmah of probably the same age as the layers in which Dr. Dnbois found these remains, flint chips, probably of human origin, were found, though recently it has been asserted that these chips had come by accident to be mixed in the bed where they were discovered.