Bite & Hop

Another of man's big (and probably dumb) relatives turned up last week. Dr. Robert Broom, 83, paleontologist of the Transvaal Museum, cabled to the University of California that he had found the gigantic teeth and massive lower jaw of an apeman far bigger than a modern gorilla. Dug out of a limestone cave at Swartkrans, near Johannesburg, the teeth and jaw are definitely human, rather than apelike. Their original owner (who will now be called "Swartkrans Man") must have looked something like the huge primates, Meganthropus and Gigantopithecus, whose teeth were found in Java and China some years ago.

Wendell Phillips of the University of California, whose African Expedition is financing Dr. Broom, described Swartkrans Man as "a million-dollar discovery, what we were dreaming about for 14 months in Africa." The discovery of Swartkrans Man should buttress the theory, not previously accepted by all paleontologists, that nature experimented, something over a million years ago, with big, lumbering men* before settling finally on the present model.

In Pennsylvania, paleontologists were studying traces of another two-legged monster more ancient and primitive than man. About two weeks ago, Michael Kosinski, a contractor, noticed some curious tracks in a sandstone ledge near Hallton, 90 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. He told his brother James, who works for Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum. James took plaster casts of the tracks to Dr. J. LeRoy Kay, who hurried out for a first-hand look at them.

The strange tracks were in sandstone laid down as mud during the Pennsylvanian Age more than 200 million years ago. They must have been made by an amphibian, for no dinosaur or other sizable reptile was alive then. And it must have been a very curious beast. The tracks, 20 pairs of them, have round heel prints about three inches in diameter. Flaring out in front are two wide-spreading, clawless toes about 5 1/2 inches long and two little toes1 1/2 inches long. A long, trailing tail made an intermittent mark between the tracks.

Since the tracks are arranged opposite each other in pairs, not in strides, the creature must have hopped. And the hops were short--only about a foot long. It must have been a clumsy monster that hopped sluggishly under the giant ferns and spreading horsetail trees which later became Pennsylvania's famous coal. But it was doing all right for its period: vertebrates had only recently learned how to live on the land at all. Short hops were a big improvement on slow, fishlike floundering.

Basic Principles

The scientific rainmakers, so far, have not produced much rain (TIME, Dec. 6). The hallowed, traditional methods are still the most trustworthy.

Dr. Franklin Fenenga, archeologist of the University of California (where the cyclotrons grow biggest), has a "rainmaking bag" that once belonged to a 103-year-old Indian medicine man. The bag contains a beaver tail, snapdragon seeds, some eagle down, a fossil fish vertebra, various kinds of pebbles, minerals and other dependable rainmakers. According to a report in the New York Times last week, Dr. Fenenga recently used his bag on Kern County, where there had been no rain for eight months.

Sure enough, the heavens opened; the rain beat down upon Kern County. Dr. Fenenga then took his bag to Berkeley and found the great cyclotron buildings drenched with welcome rain. With a solemn face, he presented the rainmaking bag, beaver tail, eagle down & all, to the University of California.

*The Java and China giants are known only by their teeth, and therefore hardly known at all. The tooth-filled jaw of Swartkrans Man should tell more about his size and build.

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