Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 62, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 March 1912 — NEW MAN THEORY [ARTICLE]

NEW MAN THEORY

Skeleton Shows Human Race is Older Than Believed. Age Over 100,000 Years—Being Much More Like the Modern Briton Than the Neanderthal Type. London. —English scientists are taking great interest in the discovery of a skeleton beneath an undisturbed layer of bowlders and clay in East Anglia, now Norfolk and Suffolk. If the evidence is good, this skeleton must be that of a man who belonged to a race that lived in that district before the most severe of the various ice movements of the glacial period. A sipgular feature of the discovery is that, in most respects, the skeleton resembles that of the modern Englishman and is not of the more simian type to which the Neanderthal man, though a much later phenomenon, belongs. There now seems to be a growing body of evidence that the modern type of man was evolved at an extremely early date before the beginning of the glacial period, but that, for thousands of years afterwards the primitive, or Neanderthal, type continued to flourish in Europe. Until this find the Neanderthal man was regarded as the oldest in Europe, and one of the scientific commentators says: “Some people were hasty enough to discern in these Neanderthal men, with their monkeylike qualities, evidence of the missing link. It is now clear that they were survivors of a stock which had deteriorated, and not progenitors of our race. If we have to accept the theory of evolution—and it Is still dnly a theory—it is a puzzling fact that man has changed so little in 100,000 years.” On this point Prof. Keith, anthropologist at the museum of the Royal of Siirgeons, says of the latest discovery: “There is every evidence that this man lived long before the glacial period. During this period England was covered with a great thickness of ice.

Finally this melted and a layer of debris was deposited. It was underneath a deposit of this sort that the skeleton was found. Hence he must have lived before the ice age and before the rivers formed. “The finding of this skeleton strengthens the belief that the evolution of man was an infinitely longer process than we originally thought. At one time believers in the evolution theory thought that man’s develop-

ment to his present state might have taken something like 10,000 years. Later they put the period at something! around 20,000 years. The difference, if any, between this man’s bodily framework and modern man’s is so minute as to prove that the evolution must have taken hundreds of thousands of! years. “This discovery shows that England was inhabited as early as if not earlier than any continental country."