Recent Home papers have been calling attention to the bones of, a skull of primitive man discovered by Mr, Turville-Petre, while making excavations on behalf of the British School of; Archaeology, in Palesti The bones were found in a cave near the Lake of Galilee on the face of a precipitous cliff in a deep ravine. 'The cave was some 70 feet in depth by 40 feet in breadth and' the roof was 60 feet above the floor level. A trench dug through' the deposits on the floor of the cavern revealed several strate ptted- tin dayers, one on top of the other, each telimy tte own. atory like the torn leaves of a book. The first layer being carefully removed and sifted showed traces of present day, mediaeval and Arab remains—bits of pottery, broken weapons etc. This covered period running back to about} 1400 A.D. Next came a layer) with relics of the Byzantine and Roman period carrying us back to B. C. 300. Then a layer going back to the bronze age, perhaps, 2,000 B.C. Beneath this was a layer of large blocks rock, evidently, a fall from the! roof and beneath this a stratum of fine, dry, reddish soil, which seemed to the geologists to be of alluvial origin so that this earth must have been washed in when the cave was below the level of the river though now it is "high up on the cliff." On this evidence the investigators must build their theory of the age in which the man lived whose skull bones they) have found in this soil.
A discovery of this kind, though, viewed by the scientific world as being of the highest importance, creates little sensation to-day' compared to the furore it would have made, say, fifty years ago. Even the man in the street is now well aware that the book of history, written in the stratifie' rocks, is a very imperfect volume. There is scarcely a complete page in the whole book and many leaves} are wanting altogether. - It is by slow and patient work that the scientist puts scrap to torn scrap and tries to make a few consecutive paragraphs that will throw some light on the beginnings of life that ante-date history. Rough guesses have already been made that put the period at, which this primitive man lived at 20,000 or 40,000 years ago. A few thousands of years are of little consequence in geo'ogicall time, but when even a vague guess has to have a fifty per cent. margin of possible error we may well be cautious in basing conclusions on such unstable foundations." Sir Arthur Keith, who is our great authority on thig subject, says there are indications that "man has come by his present form in a much briefer space of time than many of us were prepared to allow only a year or two ago." In Our early years many of us were taught that man came upon the earth fully equipped with the attributes of humanity, as Athena is said to have sprung, fully armed, from the head of her parent Zo There is not much in this latest discovery that contradicts this, the oldest theory of man's origin. For again we are told, "Te convolutionary pattern of the brain (imprinted on the inner surface of the frontal bone) is altogether, hu There is nothing in the brain of this ancient type which Teads us to think it had not attained the full status of humanity." That early man was rude in appearance and lived in degrade ed surroundings we need not doubt but, so far as the available evidence carries us, his brain power was not inferior to that of his descendants. He had already begun to use tools and was familiar with the use of fire. There is little doubt that if the most cultured modern were suddenly to find himself placed, like his ancient progenitor, in a waste land with nothing to aid him but his hands and his brain he would Teave little behind him with his bones to mark the fact that he w a highly civilized being. "The Galilean man," we are told, had suffered, "On the outer surface of his frontal bone are three depressions of a peculiar character, but each depression shows signs of healing. These healed depressions were caused by 60 form of injury or disease soi considerable time before death, Truly this man was our brother. Since he had suffered as we suffer 1 may well be that he had also loved and laughed, mourned and went as we also do, before the black disaster that overwhelmed him had swept him into the cave where, thousands of years aft wards, his bones were discov It is noteworthy that Chine historical legend reads man's history almost line for line corresponding with the cave record, There are three of the radicals or root words in Chinese which prove this. J is numbered as the 27th radical. It is read han and means a cave in which man dwelt, The left hand down stroke is the back of the cliff and the horizontal top stroke the pro-Jecting roof. The characters 1 have to do with buildings. J is the 53rd radical and also means a cave or dwelling but the additional short ates the This was a cave which had a lean-to, with a roof, built against it as an enlargement, The characters under this radical also indicate houses and buildings.
Lastly is the 40th radical and means a roof <<f}. Here the two points at the ends of the horizontal stroke are, in the ancient form, carried down. The shortened stroke in the middle should be raised again for the ige pole and thus we have rude representation of a house. The primitive man has progressed from the cave to a properly coitstructed dwelling:
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.