THE PREHISTORIC MAN.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1559, 1 October 1912, Page 5

THE PREHISTORIC MAN.

■ * , Tho lecture hail at the 'Royal Society's i House, Sydney, wa3 crowded on Septem- , ber 19, when Dr. S. A. Smith delivered a : lecture on "Tho Prehistoric Man." Ho said tho earliest type, generally called tho Neanderthal typo, differed more from their successors than the most, diverse of living races. Tho evidence showed that they were truly human'in the biological sense, that they had long assumed the erect posture; that their brain showed high development as compared with tho ane; and that thev possessed the power of speech, but their stage of culture, as revealed bv the, flint implements which had been discovered, were of a very low type. Of living races, the Australian aboriginal showed more resemblanco anatomically- to tho Neanderthal race than any other, while tho later Paleolithic and Keolithie types showed very little significant differences to modern man. Tho lowest type of all however, was the Pithecanthropus TCroctus.of Java, discovered by Buboi.s in 1891. TTis age was late Tertiary. or early quaternary. From a mass of fierce controversy, the fact clearly emerged that Pithecanthropus was undoubtedly more human than Simian, and tho general view now held was that he represented an early stage in (he development of man from a common ancestor, that was. tho ancestor of bolh man ami the monkeys.