Chronology of Early Man and Cultural Associations

Abstract

IN his recent presidential address to the British Speleological Association (see NATURE of August 1, p. 194) Sir Arthur Keith, when arguing for a parallel evolution in the development of modern races from primitive ancestral forms in their respective continental areas, demonstrated the connexion between the Australian and Pithecanthropus of Java, with the aid of mid-Pleistocene Solo man as the connecting link between the early Pleistocene Pithecanthropus and the late Pleistocene form of that region, Wadjak man. There would now appear to be a possibility that the chronological position of the undoubtedly archaic form discovered in the gravels of the Solo river at Ngandong, Java, in 1932, may be called in question. In another column of this issue of NATURE (see p. 293) reference is made to a communication from Dr. P. van Stein Callenfels, the distinguished Dutch authority on the archaeology of Indonesia, appearing in the current issue of UAnihropologie, in which he points out that the cultural associations of Solo man, harpoons and axes of stag horn, are such as in a European context would denote an antiquity of not more than nine or ten thousand years. While the early dating of Solo man has been generally accepted hitherto, if, as is stated, these artefacts are apparently beyond question contemporary with the human relics, this would appear to demand re-examination of the geological data. If further consideration supports Dr. Callenfels' argument, like the evidence of the Swanscombe skull in relation to the position of Piltdown man (see NATURE, August 1, p. 200), it would suggest that the current phylogenetic scheme, while valid as a logical classification, is an uncertain guide to chronology, and that the evolution and descent of man has been a far more complex process than has been demonstrated hitherto.