Dating – The dating of Early Man

If we had a complete set of such measurements or photographs for all members of all the generations, it would be possible to point in detail to the morphological changes by which the generalized type of the original parents has been modified to produce the specialized or differentiated types which constitute the end products or final generation. Man and the great apes may be regarded as the final generation or end products of such a family group of lines of descent. Unfortunately the original parents and many of the intermediate stages are missing. It is the aim of morphological study of the living members of the family and such fossil specimens of both ape and early man as have been discovered, to puzzle out and filling the details of the family tree, and at the same time to arrive at some idea of how, in what way, and at what stages in development have arisen the differences by which the members of the family as we now know them are distinguished. Let us turn now to the evidence of chronology. It is obvious that the various specimens of early man that are known specimens that at one time or another have been found embedded in the gravels and clays which lie beneath the upper soils of the earth’s surface, cannot by the circumstances of their discovery be dated by any usual system of chronology. Such systems require a fixed point from which to start, such as the Christian calendar possesses in the birth of Christ, a time measure, such as the year solar, lunar or calendar and a method of recording, such as a body of numerical symbols, perpetuated in writing. None of these exists for dating early man. The only means available for arriving at some idea of the antiquity of any given specimen of early man, and its relation in time to other specimens, is by examining carefully the character of the deposits in which the specimen is found and comparing these deposits with others, with a view to determining their relative age. It is well understood that from various studies and reports one can easily know about the ages of man kind.