Word: fossils
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...Europe, Asia and Africa have been found fossil men hundreds of thousands of years old-perhaps even a million years old. But not in North America. It seems likely that the first North Americans were Asiatics who crossed a land bridge which once existed between Siberia and Alaska. Fifteen years ago it was generally believed that this migration occurred very late in the Stone Age, only 4,000 or 5,000 years ago, perhaps even later. Claims of greater antiquity were inexorably demolished, and largely through the efforts of one man-famed, Bohemian-born Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian Institution...
...most ancient fossil humans known are Sinanthropus pekinensis, the old man of China, and Pithecanthropus erectus, the ape man of Java. Their ages have been variously put at 400,000 to 1,000,000 years. First Pithecanthropus relics were found in Java by a Dutchman, Eugene Dubois, in 1892. First good Sinanthropus specimen was discovered in the Choukoutien caves near Peking...
...lucky thing for anthropology that Dr. Ales Hrdlicka (pronounced ah-leesh hurd-leech-ka), famed fossil man of the Smithsonian Institution, was in Moscow last week. A young Soviet archeologist named A. P. Okladnikoff announced the discovery of a fossilized Neanderthal skeleton on a high cliff in "Middle Asia." The bones were those of a child eight or nine years...
...years ago when the only land animals were amphibians, and which was widespread and flourishing when the Age of Reptiles was just getting under way. The family has been considered extinct for 50,000,000 years because that is the most recent date assigned to any Coelacanth fossil found in the rocks. Thus the discovery of a live Coelacanth in the world of airplanes and television is as surprising, from an anatomical and evolutionary point of view, as would be that of a pterodactyl or diplodocus...
...coming to light of this "living fossil" creates an evolutionary mystery. In logic its kind should have disappeared when the seas began to be thronged with more modern, more efficient rivals. A plausible theory is that the Coelacanths retreated to the deeps where competition was not severe, and persisted there as the archaic okapi survived in the dense Congo forests, as the primitive duck-billed platypus in benign Australia. If so, some whim or freak of circumstance brought this particular Coelacanth up from the deeps to the coastal water of South Africa. And the possibility remains that other "living fossils...