SEVEN IN A CAVE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 May 1939, Page 6

SEVEN IN A CAVE

A STONE AGE MASSACRE

ANTHROPOLOGICAL TREASURE.

REMAINS OF "MODERN" MAN

The hillside at Choukoutien, in which the famous "Peking Man" was found has yielded another anthropological treasure. The Peking Man was one of the most important discoveries of what is known as ‘ancient man”; now, a few yards away, there have been found i unusually interesting remains of “mod- ; ern man.”—-though "modern" here . means anything from 20,000 to 100,000 . years old. They are the first remains ol ; an Upper palaeolithic population ever i found in Asian soil, except in Palestine. The hillside at Choukoutien, looking out from the fringe of the North China . mountains, across the gigantic North China plain, is honeycombed with ' what the geologist recognises as caves which time and the elements have filled with deposits of sand, earth, and small stones until they have become part and parcel of the hill. For some years investigators of several nationalities have been digging out these caves for the remains of man and the animals he hunted. Large blocks of material —earth, sand, and rubble in a hard compact —have been brought back ’ to Peking to be broken down bit by bit in the laboratories in the Rockfeller Institute for the valuable fossilised remains they contain, and it is from some of these that have been taken the remains of late Palaeolithic man. They come from what is known as the Upper Cave, and consist of a “population” of seven people, who appear to be members of one family: an old man, judged to be over 60, a younger man, two relatively young women, an adolescent, a child of five, and a newborn baby. With them were found implements, ornaments, .and thousands of remains of animals, including bones or teeth of bears, hyenas, tigers, hunting leopards, and ostriches. The bears, hyenas, and ostriches belong the species which are now extinct, while the tiger and hunting leopard have long ago disappeared from this part of Chirta. A DIVERSE,FAMILY. Study of the remains has produced some remarkably interesting facts. To begin with, all seven people must have met violent deaths, for their .skulls were clearly damaged by both blunt and pointed weapons, while the scalp still covered the bone. Some of the skulls are badly smashed, but those of the old man and the two women are well enough preserved to permit determination of the special characteristics. They have certain facial features in common, but in some characteristics they' differ so much that they give the distinct impression of belonging to three different racial groups which are now widely separated on the, earth’s surface. The old man has for scientists a special interest. The brain case shows him to be of a very primitive type not very far removed from Neanderthal Man. In other features he recalls European man of the Upper Palaeolithic period, While his face rather suggests recent Mongolian types,' though without being identical with any of them. His heigfh has been judged as sft 8 Jin. Of the two women’s skulls one looks liks very like that of a modern Melanesian woman of New Guinea, while the other is similar to that of a modern Eskimo woman. The skull of the “Melanesian” woman has a depression round the top where the hair meets the forehead, similar to deformations found in Amerindians and also in Eastern peoples of later date. The Ainu woman has it, as a result of carrying her child on her back, suspended from a string or strap which passes round her forehead. THE FIRST AMERICANS? From these observations some interesting conclusions are drawn. In the first place Mongolian types such as are found in the modern North China population show no features pointing to ancestry among the population of the Upper Cave. Dunodubtedly, says Dr Franz Weidenreich, who is the authority on .the Peking Man, Chinese existed in this area at that time, and these seven people may have met their deaths at their hands. He believes that long before any immigration from Asia to the New World took place the types which now compose the ; American native population were settling down in or migrating through the eastern part of Asia. It may be, i he adds, that anthropologists have been lucky enough at Choukoutien to ■ catch some of the first Indians on their i way by the land bridge to the New World.

These people had a relatively advanced culture, for found with them were stone implements, a bone needle, a bone implement, and ornaments made from beads of perforated teeth, sea shells, worked stones, and the bones of both birds and fishes. The bone needle, a finly-shaped instrument but unfortunately broken off at the eye, argues that they wore sewn clothes. The beads included drilled stones coloured with hematite, the nearest known deposits of which are across 90 miles of mountainous country. The shells show that the cave dwellers had also found the sea, now 125 miles away, and other things indicate that they had been south of the Yellow River, which is now 190 miles away. They were thus travelled people, as indeed their descendants must have been to find their way later down into North America before the Arctic and Pacific waters had met and the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska had been destroyed.