APE THEORY CHALLENGED

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 845, 13 December 1929, Page 9

APE THEORY CHALLENGED

GARDEN OF EDEN FOUND, SAYS SCIENTIST WAS IN THE GOBI DESERT Reed. 9.5 a.m. NEW YORK, Thurs. | Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, director | of the American Museum of Natural ! History, and a distinguished zoologist I and palaeontologist, challenges the i tale that man is descended from the 1 ape. Being a scientist, Dr. Osborn has little to do with Adam and Eve and the green fields of Eden; but he has. discovered for hims.elf a Garden of Eden which, he is convinced, was the true and authentic garden. This is the great Gobi Desert in Central Asia, the one-time Empire of Genghis Khan and the Tartar conquerors. Dr. Osborn believes that upon the great central Asian plateau, a windswept. and treeless region, the first men lived. “SHEER NONSENSE” BRITISH SCIENTIST SCOUTS NEW THEORY MAN’S SIMIAN ANCESTRY Reed. 9.5 a.m. LONDON, Thursday. “There is not a scrap of evidence to support the contention that primitive man lived in the Gobi Desert,” Professor Grafton Elliot Smith, of London University, said in answer to the sensational statements of Dr. H. F. Osborn, of New York, who recently supported the Darwin theory, but who now believes that man has been distinct from the apes throughout his evolution, and who thinks that the first men dwelt in the Gobi Desert. “It is sheer nonsense to say that man always has been human,” said Professor Smith. “Undoubtedly he is descended from the anthropoid apes, which are the common ancestors of the American apes and the human family. “All the available evidence indicates that man originated either in Africa or somewhere between Western India and Africa, confirming Darwin’s view that man is closely akin to the African apes. My research into blood reaction problems, the liability of infection, and immunity from certain diseases corroborates emphatically that man’s blood has relation with that of the gorilla.”