THE EARLIEST MEN WE KNOW
I’ll postpone talking about the tools of early men until the next chapter. The men whose bones were the earliest of the Java lot have been given the name Meganthropus. The bones are very fragmentary. We would not understand them very well unless we had the somewhat later Javanese lot—the more commonly known Pithecanthropus or “Java man”—against which to refer them for study. One of the less well-known and earliest fragments, a piece of lower jaw and some teeth, rather strongly resembles the lower jaws and teeth of the australopithecine type. Was Meganthropus a sort of half-way point between the australopithecines and Pithecanthropus? It is still too early to say. We shall need more finds before we can be definite one way or the other.
Java man, Pithecanthropus, comes from geological beds equal in age to the latter part of the second alpine glaciation; the Meganthropus finds refer to beds of the beginning of this glaciation. The first finds of Java man were made in 1891–92 by Dr. Eugene Dubois, a Dutch doctor in the colonial service. Finds have continued to be made. There are now bones enough to account for four skulls. There are also four jaws and some odd teeth and thigh bones. Java man, generally speaking, was about five feet six inches tall, and didn’t hold his head very erect. His skull was very thick and heavy and had room for little more than two-thirds as large a brain as we have. He had big teeth and a big jaw and enormous eyebrow ridges.
No tools were found in the geological deposits where bones of Java man appeared. There are some tools in the same general area, but they come a bit later in time. One reason we accept the Java man as man—aside from his general anatomical appearance—is that these tools probably belonged to his near descendants.
Remember that there are several varieties of men in the whole early Java lot, at least two of which are earlier than the Pithecanthropus, “Java man.” Some of the earlier ones seem to have gone in for bigness, in tooth-size at least. Meganthropus is one of these earlier varieties. As we said, he may turn out to be a link to the australopithecines, who may or may not be ancestral to men. Meganthropus is best understandable in terms of Pithecanthropus, who appeared later in the same general area. Pithecanthropus is pretty well understandable from the bones he left us, and also because of his strong resemblance to the fully tool-using cave-dwelling “Peking man,” Sinanthropus, about whom we shall talk next. But you can see that the physical anthropologists and prehistoric archeologists still have a lot of work to do on the problem of earliest men.
PEKING MEN AND SOME EARLY WESTERNERS
The earliest known Chinese are called Sinanthropus, or “Peking man,” because the finds were made near that city. In World War II, the United States Marine guard at our Embassy in Peking tried to help get the bones out of the city before the Japanese attack. Nobody knows where these bones are now. The Red Chinese accuse us of having stolen them. They were last seen on a dock-side at a Chinese port. But should you catch a Marine with a sack of old bones, perhaps we could achieve peace in Asia by returning them! Fortunately, there is a complete set of casts of the bones.
Peking man lived in a cave in a limestone hill, made tools, cracked animal bones to get the marrow out, and used fire. Incidentally, the bones of Peking man were found because Chinese dig for what they call “dragon bones” and “dragon teeth.” Uneducated Chinese buy these things in their drug stores and grind them into powder for medicine. The “dragon teeth” and “bones” are really fossils of ancient animals, and sometimes of men. The people who supply the drug stores have learned where to dig for strange bones and teeth. Paleontologists who get to China go to the drug stores to buy fossils. In a roundabout way, this is how the fallen-in cave of Peking man at Choukoutien was discovered.
Peking man was not quite as tall as Java man but he probably stood straighter. His skull looked very much like that of the Java skull except that it had room for a slightly larger brain. His face was less brutish than was Java man’s face, but this isn’t saying much.
Peking man dates from early in the interglacial period following the second alpine glaciation. He probably lived close to 350,000 years ago. There are several finds to account for in Europe by about this time, and one from northwest Africa. The very large jawbone found near Heidelberg in Germany is doubtless even earlier than Peking man. The beds where it was found are of second alpine glacial times, and recently some tools have been said to have come from the same beds. There is not much I need tell you about the Heidelberg jaw save that it seems certainly to have belonged to an early man, and that it is very big.