EARLY MAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 April 1938, Page 12

EARLY MAN

SKELETONS FOUND IN PALESTINE In a lecture given at the Royal College of Surgeons, London, Sir Arthur Keith gave an account of the earliest inhabitants of Palestine. Their fossil remains were discovered in caves of Mount Carmel by an expedition led by Miss Dorothy Garrod and financed by the British school of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the American School of Prehistoric Research. The early Palestinians, he said, were quite unlike any people now living, but are of profound interest, becauseh, if not our real ancestors, they are certainly near akin to the human stock which in the course of time gave the world its Caucasian or white inhabitants. What the expedition found was that man began to inhabit the caves of Mount Carmel long before the onset of the last glaciation of Europe. One cave, from an archaelogist’s point of view, was the richest ever opened; it was filled with fossiliferous earth tramped down by the feet of prehistoric man until an accumulation more than 80ft deep had been formed. From bottom to top the strata was pregnant with man’s stone tools, with the fossil bones of animals—many of them of extinct species—and with the bones of men and women who fashioned and used the tools. It was no exaggeration to say that these deposits record the history of man in Palestine for a period of at least 10,000 years; the period may be longer; the future is not likely to prove that it was shorter. The strata began while man was still in an early stage of stone culture; they leave off about the time of Abraham. 'Complete skeletons were found, and in one small cave excavated by Mr T. D. McGowan, of the American School, there was a veritable cemetery. Fossil remains of 10 individuals were found in it, three of them complete skeletons, while the others were disturbed burials. Altogethei' 13 of the fossil Carmelites are known by name or number. We owe so complete a representation of this prehistoric community to certain circumstances —the careful way in which the dead had been buried and the fact that Mount Carmel is composed of limstone, which tends to the preservation of bones better than any other rock. If the limestone helped to preserve the Carmelite bones, it also made ' their extraction a matter of extreme difficulty. Mr McGowan, realising the impossibility of removing the bones piecemeal in the cave, cut out the bone-containing breccia —hard as cement—in blocks weighing a ton or more, and had them conveyed from the slopes of Mount Carmel to the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London. Nowhere in the world of today could there be found a local group of people showing the wide range of structural variation of the fossil Palestinians. Chins were at every stage of evolution —from a chinless stage comparable to that of the chimpanzee to chins of moderate development. One of the most distinctive of human features is the nose; in nose form the Palestinians were not uniform; on one form the size of the bridge and general prominence might well be the prototype of the Roman nose; in another, an opposite condition —almost negroid —prevailed. The lecturer said he did not believe they had reached the homeland of Europeans in Palestine. He believed that, as research' was carried farther into Western Asia, we should find the fossil remains of men who have still less of the Neanderthalians in them and more of us moderns than was the case at Mount Carmel.