WHO WERE THE FIRST MEN?

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1616, 28 September 1916, Page 4

WHO WERE THE FIRST MEN?

(San Francisco Chronicle.) That men and women with faculties like onr own, and with high artistic powers, were living in (he region now known as Southern France and Northern Spain at least 25,000 years ago, that this is the oldest centre of human habitation of which we have a complete record, and that the record reaches without a break from the present French villages of the Dordogne Valley for hack into the ice age to dawn of human culture 10,000 years ago —these are some of the statements that grip one’s ateiition upon the threshold of Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn’s remarkable book, “Men of the Stone Age.” The author estimates that the human race emerged from the lower animal forms and began walking upright and using its hands to fashion tools at least 525,000 years ago, or about the transition time between the pliocene and pleistocene ages of geology.

Professor Osborn finds that the .125,000 years during which men used implements of chipped stone represent a complete cycle of human development.

The oldest human relic thus far found in Europe, according to Professor Osborn, is the so-called Heidelberg jawbone. He believes (hat it was used by a primitive man 250,000 years ago, in the second interglacial period, when the straighttusked, ancient elephant, the broadnosed rbiiioceroiis, and the African lion roamed in the German jungles.

Tlk* discovery of this human lower jaw in 19.07, 79ft. helow Ihe suri'ace of a sandy lilul’f, is one of the most important in the whole history of anthropology. Professor Osborn regards the hone as unquestionably human, yet “not far from the point of separation between the man and the anthropoid apes.” This is all thus far that we have to show of human history during that vast period of 200,000 years of mild climate that intervened between the second and third glacial waves. Professor Osborn holds that the earliest authentic handiwork of man —-in the shape of chipped Hints—cannot be traced further hack than the third interglacial interval, 'finis he limited the old stone age to the last quarter of the pleistocene or ice epoch, and coming down to the leolilhic limes, about 7,000 B.C.

The famous Neanderthal man lias .now developed into a whole family of specimens, representing a race that flourished from the Baltic to Gibraltar 5(1,000 years ago. Professor Osborn says the Neanderthal man has been dually established by Schwalbe as the most important: connecting link between the existing species of man and (he anthropoid apes.

This race dwelt in ‘ Europe for many thousands of years, leaving abundant stone implements to mark its passage, and even a few of bone.

Its disappearance, strangely sudden, seems to have occurred af (he same moment as the arrival of .a more talented and advanced race—the Cro-Magnons, so named from the village in.the Dorgogne Valley, where their traces were first discovered.

The Cro-Magnons are the heroes of Professor Osborn’s story. From geologic evidence the author believes that the sudden arrival of this raee, with the simultaneous blotting out of the Neanderthals, occurred between 20,000 and 25,000 years before mjf era.