MAN 6l 



Stone tools to dig out moles and hares and kill small baboons. 

 There is fossil evidence that they probably used striking 

 weapons since the broken bones of small baboons are taken 

 in the fossil matrix. It would seem that these man-apes were 

 already mentally above the level of all other primates. Dart 

 believed that at least one of the types (Australopithecus 

 prometheus) found in this series used fire for roasting food 

 and for warmth. Broom thought that these ape-men and the 

 human line branched off from the anthropoids some 25,000- 

 000 or more years ago. One of the Australopithecines may 

 have been close to the line of the ancestor of modern man. 



In this same general region at Swartkrans, one of Broom's 

 assistants, J. T. Robinson, has recently dug out evidence of 

 a giant ape-man larger than the modem gorilla. The fossil 

 is associated with the remains of extinct giraffes and saber- 

 toothed tigers. Broom thought that this giant, in spite of its 

 unusual size, had characteristics which are distinctly hu- 

 man. If so, it is not the only giant in the pre-human record. 

 In 1941 G. H. R. von Koenigswald found a fossil {Megan- 

 thropus) near Trinil on the island of Java, which indicates 

 a giant with essentially human traits. This fellow was as 

 large or larger than the modern gorilla. Again, in China, this 

 time from the indication of molar teeth alone, there may 

 have existed at some time in the past a giant weighing pos- 

 sibly as much as 800 or 900 pounds. Such weight is in no 

 way strange, because the fossil records of many reptiles and 

 mammals and even birds show numerous instances of gigan- 

 tic forms which branched off the family tree. Nature ex- 

 plores all possibilities but finally settles into a well-balanced 

 size relationship; excessive bulk is in the end more harmful 

 than good. There is the physiological possibility that the 

 present average for man is about the best and that he is now 

 unlikely to evolve to any greater or lesser bulk. 



The island of Java, where Koenigswald's giant was 

 found, was the first spot on earth to yield a fossil of early 

 pre -man when, in 1891, Eugene Dubois discovered the now 



