i!V I'lsoi i;sson sill T. \v. K. DAVin, K r.i; , i:t<^ ' jjg 



b. Ignorance of making sea-going canoes. This 

 implies that they must have crossed the Bass 

 Strait area at a time when Tasmania was a 

 peninsula of Australia. 



iv. Anatomical evidence. 



a. Alliance of Tasmanians to the primitive negrito 



races, 

 h. Archaic type of their dentition. 



c. The Tasmanian a true homo, and probably newer 

 than Pithecanthropus of Bengawan, Java, oi 

 Eoanthropns dawsoni, of Piltdown, Sussex. 



d. Tasmanian aboriginal, though for long an in- 

 habitant of a cool temperate climate like Tas- 

 mania, does not exhibit any tendency towards 

 a whitening of his skin, which appears to have 

 maintained throughout its original blackness. 



V. Associated fauna. 



a. In this respect the entire absence of the dingo 

 from any human remains in Tasmania cor- 

 roborates the evidence suggested by the Tas- 

 manian aboriginals' ignorance of the art of 

 making sea-going canoes, that he arrived in 

 Tasmania by a land bridge before the dingo 

 was imported into Australia by the early Aus- 

 tralian aboriginal. 



b. Evidence is not yet to hand that the Tasmanian 

 aboriginal was contemporaneous with extinct 

 animals such as the marsupial rhinoceros 

 {Notothcrium mitchclli, N. tasmanicum, etc.), 

 and yet the peaty deposits of Mowbray Swamp, 

 near Smithton, appear to belong to an age at 

 least as new as the stream tin deposits of 

 the Gladstone district, in which a human- 

 worked flake has been found. Moreover, Messrs. 

 H. H. Scott and Clive E. Lord describe the 

 femur of the calf of a Nototherium from the 

 above swamp which has been damaged by some 

 sharp-cutting tooth or instrument, possibly 

 either the carnassial tooth of a Thi/lacoleo or an 

 aboriginal hache. (20) 



We may now review these evidences in detail. In 

 regard to i.a., the late Mr. W. H. Twelvetrees has described 

 this occurrence (Roy. Soc. Tas. Papers and Proceedings, 



