Oldest Man?

A letter from Africa last week interested the meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Manhattan. Wrote Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey, digger in East Africa: "It is almost beyond question that the skeleton of a human being found by Professor Hans Reck in 1913 is the oldest known authentic skeleton of Homo sapiens."

Professor Reck found the skeleton in a district of Tanganyika Territory (then German East Africa) called Oldoway (pronounced Oldo-wah-ee) or "place of fossils." It is the complete fossilized skeleton of a grown man lying on his right side, with his knees drawn up to his chin and his arms folded. Professor Reck found it high up the side of a gorge where he had found the fossilized bones of extinct animals.

Professor Reck took the Oldoway man home to Berlin where he examined the find in detail. Oldoway stood 5 ft. 10 1/2 in. He had long legs and a long narrow head. His nose was big, his upper lip long, his jaw and chin massive. He looked like many a Hamite still to be seen in Northeastern Africa. To Professor Reck, Oldoway's lower teeth seemed filed to points, a fashion current among certain living African tribes.

The ground where Oldoway lay buried was pleistocene, judged to be a million years old. Was this modern-looking man buried in ancient soil fairly recently, or did he live & die in the pleistocene period of glaciers and subhuman creatures? Professor Reck believed the latter.

Other anthropologists disagreed, notably Sir Arthur Keith. But Sir Arthur eventually recanted because (he explains in his latest work*) of Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey's finds in Kenya Colony 200 miles from the Oldoway gorge. The human fossils which Mr. Leakey has--he transported one in its aboriginal mold to London--are with little question pleistocene. They were built and buried like Oldoway. One had an iron ring around a toe bone. The ring seems a preposterous anachronism.

Mr. Leakey's communication last week reported his re-examination of Oldoway's burial ground. This study "established to our satisfaction" Oldoway's antiquity.

If Oldoway is not older than the Piltdown. Java and Peking men, at least he is complete, whereas they are but scraps. If Oldoway is genuinely pleistocene, anthropologists are not much surprised at the persistence of similar people in northeast Africa today. The Bushmen of Australia, the Ainus of Japan and the Dravidians of India have survived from a stock almost as remote.

When Mr. Leakey's latest news of Oldoway reached the U. S. last week, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists were about to hold their third annual meeting at the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, president of the body, dismissed the information with: ''It will be best for everyone interested to await scientific confirmation." His associates proceeded to discuss among other things: The Nose of the American Negro (Dr. George Dee Williams, St. Louis;; The Clavicle of the American Negro (Dr. Robert James Terry, St. Louis); Body Proportions of Adult Catarrhine Primates (Dr. Adolph Hans Schnltz, Baltimore); Dental Caries in Living Alaskan Eskimo (Henry B. Collins Jr., Washington); Notes on Cheyenne Anthropometry (Dr. Truman Michelson, son of the late great Albert Abraham Michelson, Washington).

*NEW DISCOVERIES RELATING TO THE AXTIQITTY OF MAX--Norton ($5).

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