Museum Notes

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22507, 15 September 1938, Page 2 (Supplement)

Museum Notes

MAN BEFORE HISTORY

A great number of the exhibits displayed at the Canterbury Museum illustrate the study of man or anthropology. Anthropology is a big word, but it is quite easy to understand when we translate it as the Study of Man. In our school history books we read about our ancestors in the British Isles, the Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans; in the Bible we read about earlier history still, and we are taken back to a time,, perhaps 4000 years before the birth of Christ, when the first great civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia grew up in the fertile river valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. History can go no further back than this, for history depends on the invention of writing. , , But man lived for hundreds of thousands of years before history commences. To find out about these early times, we can no longer turn over the pages of the history book and learn what is written there.

We use the earth for our history book instead. Digging down under the soil we find bones of early man and the animals he hunted for food, when they were not hunting him; or we find stone tools, or the charcoal left from the cooking fires. Judging by ithe depth at which we find these remains, geologists tell how long ago these early men lived. Thus the deepest human bones which have been recovered from the earth (in Java) belong to a type of early man who is considered

(By R. S'. Duff)

to have lived 1,000,000 years before Christ. Many hundreds of thouyears passed before man commenced to use tools, or to show any sign that he was much different from the rest of the animal world. Tools first appear in great numbers from the deposits of the warm period just before the last ice age, but no skeletons have been found to show what type of man made them. With the advance of the ice, about 50,000 8.C., a new people came into Europe, called, because of their habit of living in caves for protection from the cold, the cave men. Many skeletons of the cave men have been found, so that we are able to picture what they looked like. They Vere short, and had round shoulders and bent shanks like an ape. Great ridges of bone projected over their eyes, and their mouths projected like the muizle of a dog. The illustration shows what the cave men looked like, and by our standards he was no beauty. But even at this early stage man possessed a large brain and clever hands. The cave man used fire, deftly chipped out flint tools, and buried his dead in a way that indicates his belief in a life after death.

And so new types of man come and go, as we dig back through time, but there is one question which we are still as baffled about as the cave man himself. We still do not know how or why or when man appeared on this earth. Wiih all the knowledge at our disposal we are still obliged to follow the example of the fairy-stories, and begin:

“Once upon a time there was a man . . .

Specimens of insects or plants are invited from readers. The conditions under which such specimens are found as well as the locality should be clearly stated. It is necessary to state whether the specimen, if an insect, was dead or alive when it was found.

RAIN I like the rain at night, for then The lamp-light on the puddles makes Them pools no more, but seas and lakes. And gutters, not things made by men, Of straightly laid and curved concrete, But each a Nile, on which a band Of Moorish pirates, sword in hand. Is fighting with a merchant fleet; Or else an Amazon where rain Half-hides a long canoe, of ten Head-hunters, who are hunting men. And soon with heads will pass again. I like the rain in daytime, when It runs straight off the duck's dry back And lets him with contemptuous quack Show scorn of the bedraggled hen. But best of all I like the rain Viewed from behind a windowpane. —W.F.W, i-