50,000 YEARS OLD

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 411, 20 July 1928, Page 14

50,000 YEARS OLD

ICE-AGE IMPLEMENTS DISCOVERIES IN GERMANY In a quarry in Germany, in a thick, bed of gravel, dating from the Ice Age, working implements and tools have been found. They are held to be the earliest traces of human existence yet discovered. As a consequence of the find, eminent geologists, archaeologists and anthropologists, including the American archaeologist, Forscher, have swooped down on the quarry in the hope of finding the remains of a Neanderthal man.

They are convinced that the finding of human remains is only a question of time. Already the fossilised and petrified remains of reindeer and other animals have been unearthed. The spot, the excavators are inclined to believe, was an artificially constructed drinking place for animals. Their theory is that the primitive inhabitants of the valley when they were hungry, waited until an animal came to slake its thirst and then attacked it, killing and eating It on the spot. One yield, a London newspaper states, is a mammoth’s tooth measuring lljin. Most of the remains secured are estimated to be between 40,000 and 80,000 years old, the surrounding chalk formation being of the Devonian period. It was in this district —the Neanderthal Valley, near Dusseldorf, that, in 1859, the skull and remains of a man were found. Hence the term Neanderthal man. Those remains were adjudged to represent the oldest known human race in Europe, who lived about 50,000 years before the Christian era.