SVEN HEDIN'S EXPEDITION MAKES SOME STRANGE DISCOVERIES.

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 3, Issue 717, 18 December 1933, Page 7

SVEN HEDIN'S EXPEDITION MAKES SOME STRANGE DISCOVERIES.

HISTORY IN ASIA. Fossil animals, fish, insects, and delicate gossamer flies 100,000,000 years old and perfeetly preserved have been found embedded in the rocks in Cenitnal Asia by Dr. Sven Hedin's scientific mission, which has just closed six and a half years of intensive reeearch' and exploratory work, says the New York Times. This is only one of an amazing series of discoveries made by Dr. Hedin and his twenty-seven colleagues who constitute the largest scientific expedition from the West to pu't foot on Asilan soil. The expedition covered much of the vast area of 3,700,000 square miles and brought back tens of thousands of specimens of ancient implements, pottery, footwear, arrowheads, ornamenits, early scripts, rare plants, primitive arti~ cles of clothing, as well as highly ' important data throwing fresh light on the history of the •earth. Although no fossil remains of man were found in Central Asia, the expedition dis covered many primitive flint instuments from the paleolithic period, 500,000 years ago. Fossils of ancient dinosaurs from the Mesozoic Age, more than 50,000,000 years :ago, were unearthed. More than 50,000 implements of the new Stone Age were discovered. Ten thousand scripts, 2000 years old, painbed on wood, and made long before the invention of paper, were found. The scripts relate principally to the raiding of the ancient Chinese silk route to Rome. Fantastic Finds. Accustomed as he is to rare phenomena land remarkable discoveries of all kinds in the realm, of science, Dr. Hedin, who has spent forty-eight years in studying the origin and formation of the earth', declared these latest discoveries werie nothing short : of fantastic. It will take fully ten years and at le'ast forty-five large volumes, he said, to describe the marvellous finds. IRegions in central Asia upon which no white man evier gazed were surveyed and mappied hy the expedition. .Researches also were made into1 the cult of Lamaism in Chin'a, Mongolia, and Tibet. With. a "front" of 600 miles stretching from Peiping to ' Kashgar, the expedition made an exhaustive study of the wholie of the Central Asia desert between the Edsin Gol and the Pamirs. /So-called wandering lakes land rivers, which through the ages h'ad ' changed their beds hy hundreds of miles, were discovered and charted. The most famous of these lakes, Lop Nor, ft was found, had returned sdxty miles to its original position near the. lost city of Lou Lan, discovered by Dr. Sven Hedin many yeiars ago,

which it deserted in the fourth century. Fragments of ostrich shells, about 2,000,000 years old, were discovered. The remains of animals believed to be new to science also were unearthed.