Thighbones

As Harvard's witty Anthropologist Earnest Albert Hooton once remarked, "There are not enough fossil men to go around among the physical anthropolo-gists." Hence the students of early human types must make the most of what they have. Two famed fossils of which much has been made are Peking man or Sinanthropus, found in the caves at Choukoutien about a decade ago by a Chinese scientist named Pei Wen-chung; and the Java apeman, Pithecanthropus erectus, discovered on the banks of Java's Bengaman River in 1892, by Dutch Anthropologist Eugene Dubois. Both of these oldsters appear to have lived at the beginning of the Glacial Period--roughly 1,000,000 years ago.

The original Pithecanthropus consisted of an apish skull, a very human thighbone, a few "ambiguous" teeth. Sinanthropus was first described to the world by Dr. Davidson Black on the basis of a single tooth. Later five skulls and eleven jawbones came to light at Choukoutien, but no thighbone.

After Dr. Black died, the work at Choukoutien was taken over by bald Dr. Franz Weidenreich of Peiping Union Medical College. For years Dr. Weidenreich has insisted that China's Sinanthropus was more primitive than Java's Pithecanthropus, which he regards as a backward offshoot of the Neanderthal men who emerged later in Europe. But Professor Dubois now considers his Pithecanthropus to be so primitive as not to belong to the human family at all.*

In Science last week Dr. Weidenreich described in detail the first thighbones of Sinanthropus, discovered by Dr. Pei among last season's material collected from the Choukoutien caves. One piece was twelve inches long, the other two inches. There were several human features, including 1) general shape; 2) a groove near the knee end. On the other hand the Sinanthropus thighbones differed from those of modern humans in 1) greater stoutness; 2) faint curvature; 3) decreasing thickness toward the knee end. In these same features it differed also from the Java creature's thighbone. On this basis Dr. Weidenreich assumes the Peking man's thighbones to be the more primitive. He concludes that the Java thighbone has no relation to the Java skull--an opinion advanced by other anthropologists before him. Of the more recent finds on Java's Solo River--fos-sils which the Dutch diggers take to be even older than the first Pithecanthropus --Dr. Weidenreich has nothing to say whatever.

Studying his old Chinese thighbones, Dr. Weidenreich decided that they belonged to a female who walked completely upright and was about 5 ft. tall. The males must therefore have been about 5 ft. 4 in. tall, so Sinanthropus was no pygmy. One of the thighbones was burnt --a grisly clue to Peking man's eating habits. "All the Sinanthropus bones," wrote Dr. Weidenreich, "recovered from Locality 1 of Choukoutien had received the same treatment as the game which Sinanthropus hunted. This hominid, therefore, was a cannibal."

* Admission to the human family--the family of hominidae--does not include a label as Homo sapiens, the species in which all modern men are grouped. Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus not only belong to different species but to different genera. Such later types as the Neanderthal and Heidelberg men belong to the same genus as modern man but to different species. First indubitable representatives of Homo sapiens were the tall, artistic Cromagnons who flourished in Europe some 25,000 years ago, after the Neanderthalers had disappeared.

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