ANCIENT MAN

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 222, 7 June 1918, Page 3

ANCIENT MAN

A NEW CHALLENGE. "When Disraeli, speaking in the earlier days of the Darwinian controversy, proclaimed himself rhetorically to be on tho side of the augols as against that of the apes, he won the easy ap- ■ plnu6e of the uniustructed, but was' looked upon rather askance by contemporary science," says the London "Daily Telegraph." "That lie was not quite so wrong as he then seemed was (ho burden of !i remarkable lecture on 'The ■Origin of Man,' delivered at King's Collogo recently by Professor Wood-Jones, professor of anatomy in the University of London. That man is not, as, lias been held till quite lately, descended fiom the anthropoid apes; that these would be in fact more accurately described as having been descended from man; that nian,. as man, is fnr inoro ancient that the whole anthropoid branch; that, compared with him, the chimpanzee and the oraiig-outaugare newcomers on this planet—those were the assertions made by Professor Wood-Jones, which ho claimed to have been proved not only by recent anatomical research, but to be deducible from tho whole trend of geological and anthropological discovery.

"Quite ono of the most interesting re/fereuces ■in Professor Wood-Jones's le»> ture was to the recent reports by In. Stewart Arthur Smith, of Sydney, on the Talgai skull, discovered in 188!), in thn Darling Downs , , .Queensland, but never seriously investigated till 1914. This uu (loubteclly human skull, very highly mineralised, was found in a stratum with extinct pouched mammals, and is probably as ancient as the famous PiUdown skull, whose human nature was so hotly being disputed just before the war. In deposits of the; same age as those in which, the Talgai skull was unearthed were found the bones of dingo dogs, and also the.bones of extinct pouched mam-, mnls gnawed by these dogs. Now tho dramatic interest of this discovery lies in the following facts:—Until the arrival of Captain Cook in Australia' no nonpouched mammals had ever intruded up on the Australian island continent. It is geologically certain that Australia has always been surrounded by sea since the time of the evolution of pouched mammals. Had it not been so it is almost certain that the many non-pouched mamin the neighbouring continents would have migrated thither. How, then, can the presence of the Talgai man and his dingo dogs, alone among these, be accounted for? >We are almost forced to the conclusion that he must have arrived there in boats with his family and his domesticated dogs. And the' astounding'fact emerges that at a period in the world's history when, only a year or two ago, the most advanced anatomists werb satisfied that man was scarcely distinguishable from his brute ancestors, a. man already so highly developed as to have domesticated animals, to ho a boat-builder and navigator, was actually in Australia, and to an astonishing degree the reasoning master of his own fate. In ,view not only of this, but of even more convincing evidence, gathered from man's own anatomical structure, ■Professor Wood-Jones made a 7iioving appeal for the while .reconsideration of i that post-Darwinian conception of man's comparatively recent emergence from tlif) brute, kingdom, which ho claimed to have been so disastrous to-the world's thought in view of present tragi.", events.