SUMATRA APE-MAN

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 274, 14 July 1932, Page 3

SUMATRA APE-MAN

LATEST EXAMPLE OF THE "MISSING LINK." LNDON, June 22. Details are now available of the Sumatra apeman — Orang Letjo — as photographs of the "missing link" have reached Holland, says the Hague correspondent of the "Times." These are of a baby ape, 16& inches laigh, with a skull between a man's and an ape's. The skin is only locally covered with hair, the arms do not hang to the knees like an ape's, and the animal has no tail. A hunter discovered a female and a baby in the mountains, and the mother escaped, running on her hind legs. The baby was carefully skinned, and the skeleton sent to the Batavia Museum. Professor Grafton Elliot Smith declares that stories of ape-men have been current since the time of Marco Polo. There is nothing inherently impossible, the professor says, and some type of ape, with a human likeness, may have survived in the Sumatra forests, but Marco Polo's experience should be remembered. When he visited Sumatra he heard a similar . story, and discovered a small, mummified ape, which people pretended was a human being. "One is naturally sceptical," the professor went on, "especially as