Brutes & Scholars

From South Africa's Transvaal Museum, Dr. Robert Broom brought the skull of the new species of Australopithecus Transvaalensis Broom which he obtained last year after a blast in a South African limestone quarry. From Minnesota, Dr. Ernest Albert Jenks brought the mashed skeleton of "Brown's Valley Man," which he found in a gravel pit three years ago, believes is 12,000 years old. From Java, home of famed Pithecanthropus erectus, Dr. Ralph von Koenigswald brought replicas of eleven skulls lately found, relics of a hitherto un known tribe which inhabited the island 25,000 years ago. From China, Rev. Dr. Teilhard de Chardin brought replicas of the latest skulls, unearthed last year, of Sinanthropus pekinensis ("Pekin Man") which by last week was being generally acknowledged as the champion oldster of all human fossils. A reasonable estimate of Pekin Man's age is a million years.

These sardonic reminders of man's brut ish origin were on view last week in Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences. Also on exhibition were some of the famed Folsom points, made by mysterious early Americans and dug up by scholars in New Mexico and Colorado, and reconstruction of dismembered and fragmentary fossils as they lay when dis covered in the earth -- showing the ticklish task that confronts paleontologists when they exhume old bones, and the even more exacting problem of putting the pieces together in a meaningful pattern.

The occasion was the Academy's "International Symposium on Early Man." More than 300 anthropologists from Scot land, England, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Austria, Canada and the U. S. flocked into Philadelphia to spend four days discussing the human family tree. Dr. V. Gordon Childe of Edinburgh described a 5,000-year-old dog sled, whose runners were found in a bed of Finnish peat moss and which he called the oldest dated "nonhuman tractive power." Father de Chardin charmed reporters by serenely remarking that he did not feel his belief in the ages-long evolution of man from inhuman brutes to be irreconcilable with religion. Said the priest: "There were two great crises in the earth's history--the emergence of life and the emergence of thought.

As a scientist I must admit the evidence that man was born from the animal king dom. But he was not an animal. The great, the tremendous, the significant fact about man is the coming of thought with and through him."

Spark Plug. The well-publicized as sembling of so many learned men uttering learned talk was officially a celebration of the 125th anniversary of the Academy, oldest scientific museum in the Western Hemisphere. Unofficially it was a celebration of the Academy's upsurge from dusty nonentity under the administration of its spark-plug director, Charles Meigs Biddle Cadwalader. When blue-blooded Mr. Cadwalader, an amateur lover of birds & beasts, became the Academy's active head without pay in 1928, it was generally thought of by Philadelphians, if they thought of it at all, as a vast bin full of shellfish specimens, butterflies on pins and other boring scientific trash; and it had never sent out an expedition. Mr. Cadwalader began to promote expeditions by the score, usually persuaded his expeditionists to pay their own costs afield, pointing out to moneyed adventurers that they could deduct their expenses from taxable income and have the fun of bag ging specimens besides. For example, Brooke Dolan II went to China, brought back a unique group of yellow-maned antelope, and the first baby specimen (dead) of a giant panda. Now the Academy sends out 35 or more expeditions a year, had 25 in the field last week. Mr. Cadwalader also started publishing a crisp little magazine called Frontiers. In eight years he nearly quintupled the Museum's number of annual visitors. In 1935 he was awarded the Bok prize ($10,000) for civic service to Philadelphia. Last week's international symposium was another feather in his cap, and one of the brightest.

Confusion-- As was evident from last week's discussions in Philadelphia, the problem of man's evolutionary history is complex and difficult. Early manlike creatures usually had enough sense to keep out of bogs, quicksands, asphalt and other such traps conducive to good preservation of skeletons. Their remains are therefore rarer than those of stupider animals. The confusion concerning the human family is being resolved only slowly and every new find is precious evidence.

Within wide bounds, every anthropologist has his right to his opinion of the age and evolutionary position of such evidence, and the leading ones assert that right constantly.

Another trouble source, as concerns age, is that a number of conflicting geological time scales are in use. Some geologists date the beginning of the Pleistocene (glacial period) at 2,000,000 years ago, but Sir Arthur Keith uses a scale just ten times as short, putting it at 200,000 years ago. Pekin Man appears to have emerged at the beginning of the Pleistocene period. Thus he is a hoary oldster in one man's calendar and a comparative stripling in another's. Such contradictions are not really of great concern to scientists because they deal in geological or cultural sequences rather than years. Such terms as "upper Pleistocene," "late Paleolithic," "Aurignacian," "Monsterian" give an anthropologist a perfectly clear idea of a fossil's place in the prehistoric sequence; they mean, as much to him as "late Victorian" does to a Briton or "Second Empire" to a Frenchman. But when laymen and newshawks see a fossil skull they want to know how old it is in years. Then the scholars hem & haw, mumble, "That depends." Many anthropologists, however, have adopted a sort of compromise calendar which makes Pekin Man 1,000,000 years old; Pithecanthropus erectus, the ape-man of Java, 500,000 years old; England's famed Piltdown Man about 300,000 years old.

Sometimes skeletal material found on one site shows such disparate characteristics that anthropologists refuse to believe it belonged to the same individual. The skullcap of Pithecanthropus was so apish, his thighbone so human that some doubting Thomases wrote him off, in the phrase of Harvard's Earnest Albert Hooton, as "a paleontological monster fortuitously assembled from spare parts of men, apes and microcephalic idiots."

Uncle Earnest. Harvard's Hooton is outstanding among U. S. scientists because he can talk and write with as much elegance, wit and imagination as England's popularizing Astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington. U. S. newspapers have learned that Hooton's epigrammatic comment makes excellent copy, and it is not unusual for his remarks before some obscure club in the Midwest to make headlines in Manhattan papers. Discussing the woes of anthropology in Philadelphia last week, he talked to his colleagues like a Dutch uncle.

Much argument has arisen, Dr. Hooton pointed out, solely because anthropologists are after all human beings with a desire to do something important. "There are not," he said "enough fossil men to go round among the physical anthropologists.

[The scholar] is therefore determined to leave no bone unturned in his effort to find new and striking peculiarities which he can interpret functionally or genealogically.

Unless he is very experienced, he is prone to discover new features which are partially the creations of his own concentrated imagination. . . ."

Another curious phenomenon which Uncle Earnest pointed out was the differences of attitude among anthropologists according to nationality. "While there is, of course, no unanimity of opinion as to man's origin among the German students, it is worthy of note that the prevalent and perhaps predominant sentiment of Ger man anthropologists is and has been for a number of decades decidedly pro-ape. . . . If the Germans are on the side of the apes, the English have arrayed themselves almost solidly on the side of the angels. Thus the opinion of Sir Arthur Keith and Le Gros Clark separates the human stock from the anthropoid trunk as far back as the Oligocene period [15,000,000 years ago on the compromise scale]. Again, the typical British attitude toward Pithecanthropus erectus is perhaps a full recognition of human status and anatomical integrity, with some imperialistic suspicion that he belongs to an inferior species, while the Piltdown lady is at least a complete female and, apelike jaw and all, a possible progenitor of Homo sapiens. . . . However, it seems to me that the most outstanding characteristic of British anthropology is the essentially sporting atti tude taken by scientists toward the discovery and acceptance of new finds, which may be contrasted with the morbid simian suspicions which obsess the Germans and the cynical detachment of the French."

Turning to U. S. anthropology, Dr. Hooton pointed out that whereas Europe, Asia and Africa can point to human pre cursors hundreds of thousands of years old, a U. S. find which is alleged to be even 20,000 years old is a sensation, and doughty irreconcilables like the Smithsonian Institution's Ales Hrdlicka stand ready to assail with sledgehammer blows the validity of even that recent dating. "It is to the everlasting credit of professional American anthropology that it has not succumbed to the itch for ancestors by giving recognition to the many dubious and spurious finds whose claims have too often received a facile acceptance abroad. No one can deny that this salutary state of affairs is due almost entirely to the righteous scientific iconoclasm of one formidable veteran, Dr. Hrdlicka. The unhappy but deserved fate of previous fossil pretenders to geological antiquity in America, mostly at the hands of one executioner, has so intimidated the younger physical anthropologists of this country that their attitude toward alleged fossil Americans is typically that of the poet toward the purple cow."

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