Prehistoric Men 5

Prehistoric Men 5

No tools were found in the geological deposits where bones of Java man

appeared. There are some tools in the same general area, but they come

a bit later in time. One reason we accept the Java man as man--aside

from his general anatomical appearance--is that these tools probably

belonged to his near descendants.

 

Remember that there are several varieties of men in the whole early

Java lot, at least two of which are earlier than the _Pithecanthropus_,

“Java man.” Some of the earlier ones seem to have gone in for

bigness, in tooth-size at least. _Meganthropus_ is one of these

earlier varieties. As we said, he _may_ turn out to be a link to

the australopithecines, who _may_ or _may not_ be ancestral to men.

_Meganthropus_ is best understandable in terms of _Pithecanthropus_,

who appeared later in the same general area. _Pithecanthropus_ is

pretty well understandable from the bones he left us, and also because

of his strong resemblance to the fully tool-using cave-dwelling “Peking

man,” _Sinanthropus_, about whom we shall talk next. But you can see

that the physical anthropologists and prehistoric archeologists still

have a lot of work to do on the problem of earliest men.

 

 

PEKING MEN AND SOME EARLY WESTERNERS

 

The earliest known Chinese are called _Sinanthropus_, or “Peking man,”

because the finds were made near that city. In World War II, the United

States Marine guard at our Embassy in Peking tried to help get the

bones out of the city before the Japanese attack. Nobody knows where

these bones are now. The Red Chinese accuse us of having stolen them.

They were last seen on a dock-side at a Chinese port. But should you

catch a Marine with a sack of old bones, perhaps we could achieve peace

in Asia by returning them! Fortunately, there is a complete set of

casts of the bones.

 

Peking man lived in a cave in a limestone hill, made tools, cracked

animal bones to get the marrow out, and used fire. Incidentally, the

bones of Peking man were found because Chinese dig for what they call

“dragon bones” and “dragon teeth.” Uneducated Chinese buy these things

in their drug stores and grind them into powder for medicine. The

“dragon teeth” and “bones” are really fossils of ancient animals, and

sometimes of men. The people who supply the drug stores have learned

where to dig for strange bones and teeth. Paleontologists who get to

China go to the drug stores to buy fossils. In a roundabout way, this

is how the fallen-in cave of Peking man at Choukoutien was discovered.

 

Peking man was not quite as tall as Java man but he probably stood

straighter. His skull looked very much like that of the Java skull

except that it had room for a slightly larger brain. His face was less

brutish than was Java man’s face, but this isn’t saying much.

 

Peking man dates from early in the interglacial period following the

second alpine glaciation. He probably lived close to 350,000 years

ago. There are several finds to account for in Europe by about this

time, and one from northwest Africa. The very large jawbone found

near Heidelberg in Germany is doubtless even earlier than Peking man.

The beds where it was found are of second alpine glacial times, and

recently some tools have been said to have come from the same beds.

There is not much I need tell you about the Heidelberg jaw save that it

seems certainly to have belonged to an early man, and that it is very

big.

 

Another find in Germany was made at Steinheim. It consists of the

fragmentary skull of a man. It is very important because of its

relative completeness, but it has not yet been fully studied. The bone

is thick, but the back of the head is neither very low nor primitive,

and the face is also not primitive. The forehead does, however, have

big ridges over the eyes. The more fragmentary skull from Swanscombe in

England (p. 11) has been much more carefully studied. Only the top and

back of that skull have been found. Since the skull rounds up nicely,

it has been assumed that the face and forehead must have been quite

“modern.” Careful comparison with Steinheim shows that this was not

necessarily so. This is important because it bears on the question of

how early truly “modern” man appeared.

 

Recently two fragmentary jaws were found at Ternafine in Algeria,

northwest Africa. They look like the jaws of Peking man. Tools were

found with them. Since no jaws have yet been found at Steinheim or

Swanscombe, but the time is the same, one wonders if these people had

jaws like those of Ternafine.

 

 

WHAT HAPPENED TO JAVA AND PEKING MEN

 

Professor Weidenreich thought that there were at least a dozen ways in

which the Peking man resembled the modern Mongoloids. This would seem

to indicate that Peking man was really just a very early Chinese.

 

Several later fossil men have been found in the Java-Australian area.

The best known of these is the so-called Solo man. There are some finds

from Australia itself which we now know to be quite late. But it looks

as if we may assume a line of evolution from Java man down to the

modern Australian natives. During parts of the Ice Age there was a land

bridge all the way from Java to Australia.

 

 

TWO ENGLISHMEN WHO WEREN’T OLD

 

The older textbooks contain descriptions of two English finds which

were thought to be very old. These were called Piltdown (_Eoanthropus

dawsoni_) and Galley Hill. The skulls were very modern in appearance.

In 1948-49, British scientists began making chemical tests which proved

that neither of these finds is very old. It is now known that both

“Piltdown man” and the tools which were said to have been found with

him were part of an elaborate fake!

 

 

TYPICAL “CAVE MEN”

 

The next men we have to talk about are all members of a related group.

These are the Neanderthal group. “Neanderthal man” himself was found in

the Neander Valley, near Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1856. He was the first

human fossil to be recognized as such.

 

[Illustration: PRINCIPAL KNOWN TYPES OF FOSSIL MEN

 

CRO-MAGNON

NEANDERTHAL

MODERN SKULL

COMBE-CAPELLE

SINANTHROPUS

PITHECANTHROPUS]

 

Some of us think that the neanderthaloids proper are only those people

of western Europe who didn’t get out before the beginning of the last

great glaciation, and who found themselves hemmed in by the glaciers

in the Alps and northern Europe. Being hemmed in, they intermarried

a bit too much and developed into a special type. Professor F. Clark

Howell sees it this way. In Europe, the earliest trace of men we

now know is the Heidelberg jaw. Evolution continued in Europe, from

Heidelberg through the Swanscombe and Steinheim types to a group of

pre-neanderthaloids. There are traces of these pre-neanderthaloids

pretty much throughout Europe during the third interglacial period--say

100,000 years ago. The pre-neanderthaloids are represented by such

finds as the ones at Ehringsdorf in Germany and Saccopastore in Italy.

I won’t describe them for you, since they are simply less extreme than

the neanderthaloids proper--about half way between Steinheim and the

classic Neanderthal people.

 

Professor Howell believes that the pre-neanderthaloids who happened to

get caught in the pocket of the southwest corner of Europe at the onset

of the last great glaciation became the classic Neanderthalers. Out in

the Near East, Howell thinks, it is possible to see traces of people

evolving from the pre-neanderthaloid type toward that of fully modern

man. Certainly, we don’t see such extreme cases of “neanderthaloidism”

outside of western Europe.

 

There are at least a dozen good examples in the main or classic

Neanderthal group in Europe. They date to just before and in the

earlier part of the last great glaciation (85,000 to 40,000 years ago).

Many of the finds have been made in caves. The “cave men” the movies

and the cartoonists show you are probably meant to be Neanderthalers.

I’m not at all sure they dragged their women by the hair; the women

were probably pretty tough, too!

 

Neanderthal men had large bony heads, but plenty of room for brains.

Some had brain cases even larger than the average for modern man. Their

faces were heavy, and they had eyebrow ridges of bone, but the ridges

were not as big as those of Java man. Their foreheads were very low,

and they didn’t have much chin. They were about five feet three inches

tall, but were heavy and barrel-chested. But the Neanderthalers didn’t

slouch as much as they’ve been blamed for, either.

 

One important thing about the Neanderthal group is that there is a fair

number of them to study. Just as important is the fact that we know

something about how they lived, and about some of the tools they made.

 

 

OTHER MEN CONTEMPORARY WITH THE NEANDERTHALOIDS

 

We have seen that the neanderthaloids seem to be a specialization

in a corner of Europe. What was going on elsewhere? We think that

the pre-neanderthaloid type was a generally widespread form of men.

From this type evolved other more or less extreme although generally

related men. The Solo finds in Java form one such case. Another was the

Rhodesian man of Africa, and the more recent Hopefield finds show more

of the general Rhodesian type. It is more confusing than it needs to be

if these cases outside western Europe are called neanderthaloids. They

lived during the same approximate time range but they were all somewhat

different-looking people.

 

 

EARLY MODERN MEN

 

How early is modern man (_Homo sapiens_), the “wise man”? Some people

have thought that he was very early, a few still think so. Piltdown

and Galley Hill, which were quite modern in anatomical appearance and

_supposedly_ very early in date, were the best “evidence” for very

early modern men. Now that Piltdown has been liquidated and Galley Hill

is known to be very late, what is left of the idea?

 

The backs of the skulls of the Swanscombe and Steinheim finds look

rather modern. Unless you pay attention to the face and forehead of the

Steinheim find--which not many people have--and perhaps also consider

the Ternafine jaws, you might come to the conclusion that the crown of

the Swanscombe head was that of a modern-like man.

 

Two more skulls, again without faces, are available from a French

cave site, Fontéchevade. They come from the time of the last great

interglacial, as did the pre-neanderthaloids. The crowns of the

Fontéchevade skulls also look quite modern. There is a bit of the

forehead preserved on one of these skulls and the brow-ridge is not

heavy. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion that the bones belonged to

an immature individual. In this case, his (or even more so, if _her_)

brow-ridges would have been weak anyway. The case for the Fontéchevade

fossils, as modern type men, is little stronger than that for

Swanscombe, although Professor Vallois believes it a good case.

 

It seems to add up to the fact that there were people living in

Europe--before the classic neanderthaloids--who looked more modern,

in some features, than the classic western neanderthaloids did. Our

best suggestion of what men looked like--just before they became fully

modern--comes from a cave on Mount Carmel in Palestine.