Early Man – Modern science scrutinize early man in England

From the geological evidence as well as the evidence of the fossils, obtained in the Siwalik Hill region by the latest expedition from Yale university, it would appear that at some time in the tertiary period with which we are dealing a great climatic change took place which caused the tropical belt to swing from north to south. As a result the mammals of India, of which the fossils are now being found, migrated towards the south-east of the continent. This migration, it is thought, also had a crucial effect on the development of man. It is therefore not without significance that it is in this south eastern area, namely in Java, that one of the earliest known types of early man, Pithecanthropus erectus, the ape man of Java, has been found. Further, at about the same time as the climatic changes in India there was a similar change n climate in China. This change drove out the sub-tropical animals and plants which had previously populated that part of the world, but it offered favorable conditions for succeeding waves of immigration of new forms from the north-west and the south. For these and other reasons it would seem that the balance of the evidence is in favor of Asia and more particularly the southern portion of Central Asia, being regarded as the scene of the crucial stage in man’s evolution. Some authorities would link the event with the change in the environment which took place at the great uplift of the central ridge extending from east to west, of which the Alps, Hindu kush and Himalayas form a part. This tremendous happening may well have forced man’s precursors to change from an arboreal to a terrestrial mode of existence. The ape descended from the tree and became man. The assumption of the upright posture, even as a permanent habit, does not completely differentiate man from the ape. Man has been defined as a tool using animal, but the ape also will use a convenient stick, stone or other object with sufficient sense of purpose to justify the inclusion of the ape with man as at least an occasional tool using animal. Man, however, is not only capable of making use of some material object to attain his purpose, but he alone of all living organisms also modifies the form of such object to his requirements. In other words, man is not only a tool using animal, he is also a tool making animal. If this exercise of tool making activity be accepted as the differentiating character of man it marks the stage of his transition from ape to man, as distinct from the sub-human. There is then reason to think that man came in to existence and was widely distributed over the earth’s surface long before the age of the earliest known human skeletal remains. These, as already noted, have not been found before the earliest phases of the Pleistocene. Stone implements, however, fashioned by purposive action to a definite shape and intended to meet a specific need, have been discovered in deposits of the upper Pliocene.