THE MISSING LINK

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 27, 23 April 1927, Page 25 (Supplement)

THE MISSING LINK

IMPORTANT DISCOVERY FOSSIL APE FOUND IN INDIA Who was the first man and where did he live? Making due allowances for the claims of Adam, some-time resident in the Garden of Eden. scientists are thrilled by the report from India that Dr. Guy E. Pilgrim has discovered the palate and lower jaw of a fossil ape at Bilaspur, in the foothills of the IlimaHe is said to claim that this fossil ape is possibly a remote ancestor of man belonging to a period nearly 1,000,000 years ago. He considers it not improbable that among the fossil apes of India we have our original ancestor. Dr. Pilgrim is superintendent of the Geological Survey of India and is well known at the Natural History Museum. South Kensington, and was working there last year. Dr. William D. Matthew, of the Museum of Natural History, New York, who for some time has been working in India and Java, has seen the fragments and is impressed. British scientists cautiously await further news from Dr. Pilgrim. When I visited the Geological Department of the Natural History Museum yesterday, writes a “Daily Chronicle” representative. Dr. F. A. Bather, the Keeper of Geology, was arranging for the display of fossil reproductions which have some bearing on the latest discovery. From to-day the public will be able to see reproductions of fragments of the ape Sivapithecus, discovered by Dr. Pilgrim in 1911, and also pieces of the better-known fossil ape Dryopithecus. Dr. Pilgrim thinks that his new find was once the head of some form of Sivapithecus. Opinions differ regarding the placing of the two. But it is generally agreed that Dryopithecus, first unearthed in France, and then later in Spain and India, is more closely related to man than any other form of ape. If Dr. Pilgrim’s theories prove correct, he has found the oldest skull in the world. , “The Java Woman.” found in 1892, is supposed to be 500,000 years old, while the Piltdown, Sussex, skull of 1912, the oldest human relic discovered in Britain, is of a much later date. If this remote ancestor of ours, dug up by Dr. Pilgrim, really flourished 1 000,000 years ago, and the fact be capable of scientific proof, then a great step forward has been taken in the discovery of the real “missing link.”