Oldest?

The Dutch-owned island of Java has been a rich hunting ground for investigators of the human family tree. In 1890 Professor Eugene Dubois found the first fossil bones of the famed apeman, Pithecanthropus erectus. Another early type found in Java, Homo soloensis, shows affinities with the Neanderthalers of Europe and the Rhodesian men of Africa. The fragmentary skull of a child, christened Homo modjokertensis, appeared to be in extremely ancient ground, but its features were too undeveloped for exact anatomical comparison. Two years ago primitive tools were found in Java, including points, scrapers, cores, and hand-axes typical of Old Stone Age cultures elsewhere but never before found east of Madras in India.

If anthropologists had as clear a picture of human evolution as they have of horse evolution (a neat series ascending from four-toed little eohippus), their lives would be less exciting but laymen would understand them better. Professor Dubois first ascribed Pithecanthroptis to the Pleistocene or Glacial Age, then shifted him to the preceding period, the Pliocene. Although extremely apelike, he was admitted to the human family by the skin of his primitive teeth, but Professor Dubois has changed his mind again, now pigeonholes the ancient creature as an ape related to the gibbons. Professor Dubois considers that all the original bones belonged to the same species; other authorities disagree with him.

The equally famed old man of China, Sinanthropus or Pekin man, is definitely human but paradoxically more primitive in some features than Pithecanthropus. It is not certain that Sinanthropus is older than Pithecanthropus, although the workers in China think so. Both appear to have lived somewhere near the beginning of the Pleistocene. One figure given for their ages is 500,000 years; another is 1,000,000 years. Two conclusions which emerge with reasonable probability from the welter of anthropological confusion are: 1) that early man flowered in a number of different genera and species which became extinct before Homo sapiens appeared, and 2) that the common ancestor was a giant, arboreal ape related to the well-known fossil ape genus called Dryopithecus.

In Washington last week a new find was announced which may either clarify the situation or obfuscate it further, and is certain to be argued about. Dr. Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigsvald, research associate of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, had found on the banks of the Solo River in Java several teeth, a lower jaw and skull fragments of a humanoid creature which he took to be considerably older than Pithecanthropus, and therefore the oldest human or subhuman relic ever discovered. The lower jaw was "very heavy, with large teeth having resemblance in various characters to several of the most primitive human types." The position of the ear and lower jaw socket were human, the absence of a well-developed mastoid process "very apelike." The back of the skull was missing, as though smashed in by a blow.

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