The Antiquity of Man.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 29 November 1912, Page 4

The Antiquity of Man.

Professor A..Keith gave a discourse on "Modern Problems relating to the Antiquity of Man," before the British Association, He said he could not citc a more stalwart representative of the orthodox opinion to-day than Professor Boyd Dawkins, who held that man was evolved during the Pleistocene period, and was therefore, from a geologist's point of view, a recent addition to the earth's fauna. A moderate figure for the duration of the. Pleistocene period was 100,000 years, and if might it taken as the orthodox opinion that the cbnpi of the very earliset form of humanity lay 100,000 years behind us, and in that time man as was now known had been evolved from a crude almost prehistoric form. Taking the view of M. "Rutot as representative of modern heterodoxy, he pointed out that if his elaim to have traced man by means of his eolitbic culture through the long Pliocene and Miocene periods, and even info I,he Oligoeene period, were admitted, on the estimates of Professor fiollas, which were disputed by Mr Rutot, the antiquity of man must he placed at over 3,000,000 years.

Pile problem of man's antiquity was not yet solved. Tho picture he wished to leave in their minds was that in the distant past there was not one kind but a number of very different kinds of men in existence, all of which had become extinct except that branch whib had given origin to modern man. On the imperfect knowledge at present nt disposal it seemed highly probable that man as we knew him now took on his human characters near the beginning of the Pliocene period. How long ago that was must be measured hy tho changes which the early and living things had undergone, and let it was only human to try to find a means of measuring that period in a term of years, and the estimates at hand gave an antiquity of at least a million and a half years.