“Ape Origin of Man a Myth”

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1004, 21 June 1930, Page 20

“Ape Origin of Man a Myth”

Distinguished Scientist Says Investigators Must Depend on Fossil Hunters For Final j Solution of Man’s Origin.

OME 16,000,000 years ago j the low-lying earth, coy- , eved with forests and i marshes, had begun to heave into the present Continental plateaus. On these primitive plateaus a long-legged, semi-erect creature emerged to roam the uplands, but at the threat of serious danger he could "shinny” up j a tree and find refuge in. the woodj lands at the edge of the savanna. He was not an ape. He did not j hook his forelegs from branch to branch to swing through the treetops. He had a hand with a human thumb. He had a brain which could plan and invent. He learned to handle a club and throw a stone and hunt animal flesh for food to supplement succulent roots and berries. Here, says Dr. Henry Fail-field Osborn, is the ancestor of man. As one of the greatest of living scientists, he challenges the long-accepted ape-man theory. Basing his conclusion upon a re-examination of the mass of kuowi ledge accumulated in the last 30 years, Dr. Osborn has interested the scientific world not only with his assertion of the staggering antiquity of man, but also because he now declares that it is no longer possible to believe that i man is the offspring of the ape. “We have gone back 25,000,000 years in the history of the elephant, the rhinoceros, the horse, the thpir and other animals, .only to find that they present every detail of bony structure present in their modern descendants. “If this is true of these mammals, who show no fundamental change, why is it not possible to accept the fact that man, the aristocrat of them all, also has a remote antiquity? “And as we push back the age of man, his youth extends into a period which makes it chronologically impossible for him to have descended from the ape. There was a common ancestry, but when the separation occurred, the apes slowly developed under the retarding influence of forest life, while the Dawn Man. impelled by j | necessity to make a struggle for ex- 1 ! istence in the open country, began to i transform himself into the races out | of which we have come, j “The evidence of time is against the j j ape theory. I “So is the evidence of body struc- j

uve. Through euauge ot junction lature may transform an organ, but it •au never restore a single lost pat”, vhether it be a lost tooth, a lost ligit, a lost anldeboue or rib or a lot emlon or nerve. “This is Dollo’s principle that tin evolution of the anatomical organs i lever roversible, even though tii evolution of habits ami functions i frequently reversible. "On this principle the Iranian ha. could never reacquire the nerves. ; muscles, functions, freedom, flexibilty and separate supply of nerve fov<- j o each finger which was lost in the ! ligllly specialised aboreal ape hand; ! he opposable human thumb could not ; spring back from the partly atrophied ! ipe thumb. Asked to explain the change in Ills j dewpoint, Dr. Osborn said that he lad accepted the ape theory of Darrin and Lamarck until 1924, when he ; could not erase from his mind the i ’act that tlie limb proportions of all j he primordial races of man—the ! rrinil, the Neanderthal and the Cro- j Magnon—had not revealed a trace of tpe ancestry; they were 100 per cent, j pro-human; -they were indicative of j ong legs and short arms. Another fact contrary to the ape : heory was the discovery of fossil ; lands of t wo finely preserved speei- j mens of tlie Neanderthal race. Those; lands were 100 per cent, human; they ! nad clistinctfy well-developed thumbs; [ they had manlike, not apelike, fingers, j and they were capable of fashioning | not only the* coarser but the finer j tools which were used and which j were gradually evolved during the I long Neanderthal stage. After the discovery of-flints in the fossil bed of South-east England ; known as the Red Crag, Dr. Osborn ! himself announced that they were left there 1,250,000 years ago. This find demonstrated that the race which fashioned these flints had a perfectly formed hand, with a wellformed grasping thumb, with deft fingers guided by a clever and de- | signing mind, which ' could only be lodged in a large forebrain. This not only challenged the apeman theory, but also it thrust back the separation point between man and ape into the remote Qdigocene past—about twenty million ye.ars—tar beyond any previous caleulti'ons or estimate. “In this somewhat divided state of mind,” continued Dr. Osborn, “strongly inclining toward the ape-man hypothesis, but with some misgivings on the score of limb proportions, of the structure of the hand and of the toolmaking capacity of the brain, I accompanied Roy Chapman Andrews on a rapid reconnaissance journey into the very heart of the Gobi Desert. “Carefully trained lo observe and reconstruct past conditions from da; a in tossils and rocks, I suddenly found myself forming an entirely- new concept of human origin, namely, that

lie actual as well as the ideal « .ironment of the ancestor* of man*" tot in the warm-forested lowland* \sia or any other continent, but in lie relatively high, invigorating ands of a country such as Centri \sia was in Miocene and Oligoc ime—a country totally unfitted inv form of anthropoid ape. “Onlv here were rapidly ;wo and lour-footed types evolvea. lere alone is there a premium rapid observation, on alert and »*'** fill avoidance of enemies; I,e '' e -ould the ancestors of man find materials and early acquire the if fashioning flint and other t 00l • “These conclusions and others numerous to mention sent me ba “ f . complete convert to an entirely [oncept of the environment of P r live man; he could not have bee forest-liver; he could not hare habited a warm tropical country, could not have learned to fashion where no flints or rocks capable oi being shaped into tools were t found; he could not have preserve - intelligently directed use the mar • loiik powers of the human thumb - less opposed by the flexibU fingers“ln tlie uplands of Mongolia co ' tions of life were apparently idem ‘ the development of early man, since all the evidence points to - as the place of origin of man, an _ Mongolia and q’ibet. the top oi world, as the most favourable S graphic centre in Asia for au®* event, we may have hopes of * n ” the remote ancestors of man in section of the country. . “However, this Mongolia idea be treated only as an opinion, not yet a theory, but the r pun sufficiently sound to warrant tui extended investigation. _ “The final solution of this P ro “' therefore, rests with the fossil a and explorer, whose task is an fremely difficult one. because fos--mains of primates, always scarce, come increasingly scarce a--primates rise in the scale of ingence. Ido not know the e figures, but J think ir is safe to• that 50,000 to 1 is ibout the of probable chance that we ean ■ cover fossils which will give tbi- • of proof concerning the oriel** man. , u nd^of* ' geog raph >V' in the theory that the pro mail sl ° , well established in Uiigocene »» now conservatively estimated 16,000,000 years ago.'*