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Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 240, 30 December 1927, Page 13

MAN’S ORIGIN

A New Theory Noted Scientist's View CHALLENGE TO ANTHROPOLOGISTS Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, curator of the division of physical anthropology of the National Museum at Washington, challenged a widely-accepted belief among anthropologists that the prehistoric Neanderthal man represented a different species from Homo Sapiens, when he delivered the Huxley memorial lecture before the Royal Anthropological Society in London. The Neanderthal man, that giant, grisly creature who slouched through the icy world from 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, is a true ancestor of man as he is to-day, according to Dr. Hrdlicka’s view of the available evidence and not, as hitherto believed by many, a sub-human species exterminated by Homo Sapiens as the earth grew warmer. Fittest Survived Instead of melting into oblivion with the glaciers the Neanderthal man adapted himself to the exigencies of the changing climate, and, through survival of the fittest, became the ancestor and not the victim of the “true man,” Dr. Hrdlicka contended. If the assumptions about prehistory held by man were true, said Dr. Hrdlicka, science is confronted by a strange major phenomena, a long double line of human evolution, either near by or in the same territories, the sudden extinction of one of these lines and the evolutionary sluggishness or pause of the other. These hypotheses led to a maze of difficulties and contradictions, he continued. They gave a Homo Sapiens without showing why, or liow r , or where he developed his superior makeup and implied that while he evidently developed at a much more rapid rate at first to reach the status of Homo Sapiens, he then slackened greatly to remain from the beginning of the postglacial period of to-day at nearly the same evolutionary stage. The conception of the ice age as composed of four distinct periods, with three well-marked interglacial periods, did not harmonise with either palaeontological or human evidence. Dr. Hrdlicka said. Both these tended to show but one main interglacial interval, from which there was a gradual progression toward an irregular cold period, after which followed an irregular post-glacial period. The Mousterian or Neanderthal phase of man, he said, began toward the *end of the warm, main interglacial* period, when man was brought face to face with great changes in his environment calling for new adaptations and developments bringing about greater mental and physical exertion and intensification of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. Rapid Change Strong evidence of a relatively rapid progressive change taking place during the Neanderthal period, the scientist said, was furnished by the great variability in the skeletal remains from this time. . , Such, evolution, he w?nt on, would certainly differ from region to region, and conceivably, if not inevitably with these processes toward the height of the glacial invasion, the population decreased in numbers and the fittest group or groups eventually alone survived. Here seemed a relatively simple natural explanation of the progressive evolution of the Neanderthal man, Dr. Hrdlicka continued, and such evolution would inevitably carry his most advanced forms to those of primitive homo sapiens. The vastness of his ditsribution, the improbability of invasion from warmer climates into colder, and the absence of any trace of superior beings were all against the theory that the Neanderthal man was exterminated by a conquering race. Dr. Hrdlicka then painted a graphic word picture, giving his idea of this grim, grisley ancestor of man, whose neck, he said, was so poised that he could not turn back his head to see the sky, who knew of lire but not agriculture, who had implements and tools, who hunted the mammoth and rhinoceros, the cave lion, bear, hyena horse, ox, bison, reindeer, and stag, and, perhaps, the sabre-toothed tiger. The Neanderthal man, Dr. Hrdlicka said, was of moderate stature and heavy build. He had a large, thick, oblong skull, low forehead, low vault, protruding occiput, large, full upper jaw, large nose, large teeth, and large heavy lower jaw ’with receding chin. His bones were stout and his legs relatively short. , ~ He did not boil bis food and left no known pictorial representations of the animals he hunted, but judged from the beautiful implements he made, he was not deficient in the art sense. Dr. Hrdlicka declared.