Millions of Years Old?
PROFESSOR H. F. OSBORNE, in his recently de•*• livered address at the two hundredth annual meeting of the American Philosophical Society, devotes his time to the origin and antiquity of man....
...None the less it may be wagered that numbers of little books will continue to appear in which we shall have the old ape story once more detailed, just as if we had the same evidence in support of it that we have for the descent of any family of well-certified pedigree...
...for to venture on speculation in this matter would in all likelihood be merely to add to the 'hecatomb of error' which De Geers so clearly foresees...
...Even Keith, who is regarded by Boule as extravagant, did not go further than 350,000 years back...
...There is no doubt as to Professor Osborne's ideas of his antiquity, for he puts the origin of man back to no less than 16,000,000 years ago...
...And now Professor Osborne comes along and boldly says: "I regard the ape-human theory as totally false and misleading...
...There is no question that SoUas is abundantly right when he says, in the latest edition of his classical work, that the last phase of the old stone age can be dated back with fair certainty to 7,500 years from the present day...
...that his color was such and his hair so...
...That will startle geologists like SoUas of Oxford and prehistoric archaeologists like Breuil—the acknowledged dean of that body— since they have been contented so far with a limit of 50,000 years...
...the Taungs skull—just the cranium of an anthropoid ape, as Keith tells us...
...In regard to the predecessors of the men of that time, "no dates can as yet be safely assigned...
...The question may be asked again, as it has been before, though up to the present no answer has been vouchsafed: In 7,500 years man has advanced from the stone age to our present marvelous civilization...
...what was he doing all that time that he made no progress...
...the ape has a quadrupedal, brachiating, tree-living psychology...
...And how many times have they been found 1 The Neanderthal man, now recognized as a representative of a well-known race...
...Darwin's Descent of Man was published nearly sixty years ago...
...he was a man in every sense of the word...
...The progenitors of the human race were, according to Darwin, apes of the Catarrhine or old-world type...
...of none of which things we have a single grain of evidence...
...The thing is incredible...
...In the matter of man's origin, the Professor throws a bomb into the ranks of the writers of many textbooks...
...We have been told that early man could not talk, but only jabber...
...It should be banished from our speculations and from our literature, not on sentimental grounds, but on purely scientific grounds, and we should now resolutely set our faces toward the discovery of our actual pro-human [so printed in Science, but surely "pre-" is intended] ancestors...
...so now we know, and may "try back," as fox-hunters say...
...Thus the Professor...
...the Java man, whom many regard as nothing more than an ape, though Professor Osborne thinks that he was a low-grade man with a brain not much smaller than that of the Veddahs of today...
...Since that time what a vast amount of search has been made for those pre-human ancestors whom we are now really to make an efi^ort to discover...
...From the time that that statement was made down to this very day we have been deluged with accounts of man's simian ancestry, set down with an assurance and minuteness which would not be out of place in the Almanach de Gotha...
...Mousterian man had a brain as large as ours...
...And all the time we were barking up the wrong tree...
...Yet he comes very early in the story...
...Man has a bipedal, dexterous, wide-roaming psychology...
...he believed in a future life...
...The fact of the matter is that all of these statements are but guesses—some of them wild, some of them conservative...
...for millions of years—teste Osborne—^before that he was man...
...he had the skilful hands of a craftsman...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 7
