CRADLE OF MANKIND

Waikato Times, Volume 122, Issue 20505, 23 May 1938, Page 9

CRADLE OF MANKIND

WAB IT CHINA? RUMINATIONS ON PEKIN MAN (Times Air Mail Service) LONDON, April 12 Out of tiie past yesterday came reminders that life was not always noise and glamour, comments the Daily Mirror. China mail brought description of the latest clue to baby-eating “Pekin Man," possibly your oldest ancestor. Excitement was over a thigh-bone. Archaeologists, who found it near China s ancient capital, say it's 1,000 - 000 years old. That dates it before the well-known Ice Ages. But we who live in the Ice Cream Age needn't get snotty. If jt hadn't been for these old cave-wallahs of the Orient, and their contemporaries nearer home, there'd be no usFifty skulls altogether have been found near Pekin. They represent all manner of people, male and female, from five to fifty. Foot Old Joe And they seem, say the archaeologists, to have been victims of a cannibal feast. Some authorities now think mankind s cradle was in China. Support comes in second theory that Old Joe, the Ape-man of Java, once thought to be the Missing Link (between man and monkey), is merely mid-Plelstocene Age. Which would make him 400,000 years old. Of course, Britain has also claim to being the race cradle. Piltdown Man Is as old as Java Joe, probably older. But, like Joe, only fragments of skull remain. Pekin Man is represented by a colony. Gives the scientists a decent chance.

(If you like big names, Joe Is oalled Pithecanthropus erectus* Pekin Man is Sinanthropus pekinensis.)

Fragments of a reindeer skull, dating from the Ice Age, were found in a stalactite cave near Shibenik, on Dalmatia's Riviera.

Only one horn has been preserved. The whole skull is encrusted with stalagmite deposits. This is one of very few ever found in Southern Europe. But it, too, helps to clear the road on that lonar. long way back to the days when You were a Tadpole and I was a Fish. No cracks, please.