ANTIQUITY OF MAN.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 March 1918, Page 6

ANTIQUITY OF MAN.

Anthropologists are beginning to tales a, new, for ,theni, view of the progress of man upon the earth. They are coming back slowly but surely to the view that the man of the stone age, who was little more than a brute, was the result of a de\ olution downward from a higher type instead of an evolution upward from some ape-like creature. The idea was first set forth in modern scientific literature six years ago by no less an authority than Professor Dwight, who had been for about a quarter of a century Parkman Professor of Anatomy at Harvard.; But at that time biologists and anatomists were too prejudiced to pay much attention to it, except those whose prejudices were so violent that, they openly | opposed it. The words of Professor Dwight, used in his hook "Thoughts of a ! Catholic Anatomist," were: "For my part, I believe the Neanderthal man to be a specimen of a race not arrested in its upward climb, but thrown down from a higher position." And, further, although the "Neanderthal race was an excessively old one, skeletons of a higher race which, according to the view I have offered, must have existed at the same Lime as the, degenerate ones, are still to be discovered." Professor Arthur Keith, vim six years ajrn was one of those who emphatically held the Neanderthal race was that from which modern man had sprung, published a book about a year ago in which he too came around to Professor Dwight's view. This book is "The Antiquity of Man," and its chapter of conclusions contains the following words:—"'We are compelled to admit that men of the modern type had been in p.vistenee long before the Neanderthal tvne."