SEEKING MAN'S ANGESTORS.

Shannon News, 3 October 1924, Page 4

SEEKING MAN'S ANGESTORS.

AJUONG DINOSAURS' GRAVEYARDS. IN DESOLATE GOBI DESERT. What a Nightmare Land that' Garden of Eden of Science must have been with its gigantic lizards, its flying monsters and goblin-like creatures! Man, had he lived rn those days, would probably have been an egg-stealer like the smaller dinosaurs, and his journeys in search of, food would have been' attended by. perils and terrors to which nothing in these days is comparable. Science now believes that the orig-

inal Garden of Eden f where Adam and Eve lived, was not down in the valley of the Euphrates River, in Mesopotamia, but up in north-eastern Asia, in what is now the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. ' ' ; Of course, the conception that science has of Adam and Eve is somewhat different from that commonly accepted, since evolution teaches tnat only after many thousands of years of hardship and struggle could mankind hav e worked up to such finished beings. For a number of reasons science is

inclined to think that the region of these early struggles and, perhaps, also the region that first saw man in the shape that he holds to-day is that of the Gobi. When all the rest of the world was practically uninhabited by such a two-legged creature, Mongolia offered a place for him to develop. To find, if possible, bones of these earliest ancestors of humanity, the Adams and Eyes of science, an expedition of the American Mueum of Natural History in New York is now on its way to the, desert. They hope to find, also, perhaps, even weapons and nousehold utensils of these fathers and mothers of humanity.

These a?e the same explorers who discovered last year in the Gobi the bones of the biggest dinosaurs' that ever walked the earth, and also some

7,000,000-year-old eggs of those same monstrous lizards. \

The Gobi is one of the most extraordinary spots on th>e globe, and about no place in the world are there so vmany legends and, superstitions. The wind blows its sands away and

uncovers ruins of cities of unknown ' long lost races—only to blow back the sand next day and cover them again irretrievably. Somewhere buried in its sands is the great capital which Genghis Khan; the Mongol conqueror, built to hold the treasures his hordes looted from Asia a"nd Europe. Weird { mirages hover continually over it, and J its nights are filled with strange . ' sounds. Music is heard where there is none to play, spirits both evil and good haunt it, and ghostly a-rmies flying phantom banners march beneath \ itfi moons-7-so run the stories. i Whatever may or may not be true > of all that, to science there is no more interesting place than the Gobi since the expedition sent out by the American Museum of Natural History in New York found the gigantic graveyard of the dinosaurs there. There are wild camels and wild ljorscs in the Gobi,, and immense herds of antelopes—which, by a strange provision of nature, require no water to drink, deriving it from the grass they , eat. Relying upon their extraordinary speed, the latter seem almost fearless of man. The explorers, on their last expedition, chased antelopes with automobiles, and found that they I could run 60 miles an hour! I Bandits infest the caravan routes; . but the expedition travels in motor--cars—seven of them on the last trip<— 1 . and is well armed, with repeating ', rifles'and revolvers. The only dangerI ous animals of the desert are large i half-wild dogs, which are greatly dreaded by the natives. Savage and 1 fearless, they have acquired a taste for human flesh through feeding upon, the bodies of the dead, which, according to custom in that country, are not I

buried but exposed. It was not far from the middle of the Desert of Gobi that the explorers on their last expedition found what

they have described as the greatest fossil beds .in the world—immense graveyards. They occur in grey-white strata which the eye can easily follow along hillsides where the rocks have been eroded by rain, wind and frost, in places exposing the entire skeletons of prehistoric monsters. Here and there at the foot of a declivity, or perhaps half-way down the slope; a skull lies ready to be picked up. The grey-white strata are a sedimentary formation. Once upon a time, perhaps 10,000,000 years ago, they

wer e mud— sL mixture of sand and,silt on the bottom of shallow lakes and swamps. When the dinosaurs died the: bodies of many of them became embedded in the mud, which preserved* their skeletons. Eventually the mud hardened into rock still retaining the bones, to tell in a later age so wonderful a story. I'n the days of the dinosaura the i Gobi region was no desert. On the j contrary, it was. a well-watered country, with large rivers, numerous shali low lakes and extensive swamps. The j climate was subtropical. All conditions were such as to favour the multiplication and development of reptilia'n life. So far as we know, no | mammals then existed. The period j was what geologists call the CretaI ceous—the Age of Reptiles. It should be realised that the dino- ( saurs were not merely a species— I they were a whole order of creation. ■ Some were literally "as big as a , house," and a mighty big house at that. They leaped along on two ponderous hind legs with their heads 40 feet high in air and more than 100 feet of body between the cruel jaws of the head o'a the serpent-like neck and the wicked tail that served equally well as a tripod leg for squatting or as a gigantic club for fighting. Others

were no, bigger than ' foxes, with a head mostly fangs, and some, about as large aa terriers, had big parrot-like

beaks and turtlerlUse heads, a third, as large as their entire bodies. j Some had smooth, leathery skins, ! while others were sealed and armourplated; some had a row of teeth along their spines that made them look like animated saws —and, indeed, in battle, that is exactly what they were. Others were equipped with tough, batlike wings measuring 30 feet from tip to tip. and'l-nids that looked like nothlug so nich as enormous bird skulls. And all these creatures leaped and hopped and ra 1; slithered and liew about what is now tho Desert of -ihe Gobi.

In those days the Gobi must have I been in truth a nightmare land. The dinosaurs were not merely numerous; they overran the plains and the hills, the swamps and borders of lakes in •multitudinous swarms. For the vegetable feeders there was unlimited food, and upon them preyed the ferocious carnivores. There was besides a curious, 1 little, crooked-nose dinosaur, not much bigger than a dog. These were presumably .extraordinarily active and alert. Curiously, they show signs of having had better developed brains than any of their bigger kin, and ther« is evidence that their-favourite.article of food was the eggs of the other dinosaurs. Indeed, the skeleton of on e of these small "egg snatchers" has been found resting upon an actual nest of eggs which it was devouring at the time of its death! Science does not believe that man was on earth at the time when these monsters were at their height. Humanity developed some millions of years afterward, when there were no dinosaurs, except perhaps, ' here and there in isolated sections of the globe where conditions remained favourable to their existence.

But it has not yet been proven that the dinosaurs did not continue in the Gobi for a long time after they had been wiped out in other sections of the world. It is possible that in that nightmare country the early ancestors of man did see and fight for life against the goblin-like creatures. Perhaps, like the small dinosaurs, one of his favourite articles of food was the dinosaur eggs. If this was so, what a life our ancestors must have led, with the great saurians ever menacing, the winged lizards darting down upon him from the air with their cruel fanged mouths and other hideous, creatures menacing him from every side. It is possible, and some scientists hold that it must be, that our legends of the flying dragons, the crawling dragons and leaping dragons and other such monsters come to us from immemorable ages Ago when these creatures were actually beheld by earliest man. And if all this is possible, then it is not beyond the range of probability that it was in what is-now the Gobi Desert that man first beheld them and

strove against them for existence. In their previous explorations the explorers found not merely additional specimens of the great prehistoric reptiles already made known through discovery of their fossil remains in other parts of the world. They unearthed the ancestors of those reptiles, and proved that their species originated in Mongolia. At a period when Europe and America, were continents at sea level and practically awash, Mongolia was a fertile, elevated plain. "We have found the animal Garden of Eden," says Professor Osborn, who is chief palaeontologist of the Ameri can Mifseum of Natural History,'* and we think we shall succeed in proving that it was the human Garden of Eden as well. The new expedition may bring to light the bones of ancient Mongolian plainsmen whose, forebears crossed the land bridge to America and migrated to India, Europe and Africa, eventually accomplishing the distribution of mankind throughout the world. "We have found horses, closely similar to the modern horse, that lived a million years ago. Why, should we not find men who lived a million years ago? That is exactly what we do expect to find in Mongolia—a pre-hu-man type contemporary with the prehorse type. "For, at least 500.000 years the earth has supported man—the animal that makes tools, lights fires, wears clothing and fashions utensils and weapons. "But man half a million years ago had already reached a stage of development in which he did all those things. He must have had a long history antecedent thereto. We think of the early Ston e Age as very ancient, but before that there must have been an age of wood, when men, having not yet learned how to make tools of chipped flint, used a ready-at-ha'nd material that was much more easily shaped.

"Taking all the evidence into view, we may confidently assert that a man possessing a relatively large brain and making his tools aad weapons of wood existed a million or more years ago. For that length of tim e he has been a dweller in the open. If his ancestors found the animal Garden.of EdCn, and we think we will prove that it was the lived in the forest, they left the trees at a much earlier period. "I repeat—in the Gobi w e have human Garden of Eden as well."