TJie Soiitlt Australian Naturalist. 61 



the dingo does. They did not evolve here. Whether they 

 came together or separately, and the time and manner of their 

 coming, are questions difficult to answer. 



One of the latest pronouncements on the matter is made by 

 Professor Wood-Jones, now of the Adelaide University, in a 

 lecture on the Origin of Man, delivered at King's College, Lon- 

 don, in 1918. Professor Wood-Jones' opinion is refreshingly 

 positive in expression. In the published record of the lecture 

 referred to, after discussing the evidence of the ancient Talgai 

 (Queensland) skull and of various dingo and extinct marsupial 

 fossil remains, he says of Man and the dingo: ''No land bridge 

 let them in, else a host of eutherian followers would have 

 crossed Wallace's line in their company. Beyond a doubt they 

 came by sea, and they came not as sea-tossed castaways such as 

 are those animal pioneers that furnish the population of some 

 distant islands. The progenitor of the Talgai man came with 

 his wife, he came with his dog and Avith his dog's wife, and he 

 must have done the journey in a seaworthy boat capable of 

 traversing' this unquiet portion of the ocean with his consider- 

 able cargo." 



As suggested above, there is no generally accepted positive 

 evidence that the aboriginal and the dingo came to Australia 

 together. Still, there is no doubt of the remote antiquity of 

 both in this continent, with a high degree of possibility that 

 they came together. The best evidence of the high antiquity 

 of man here is the Talgai skull, found in 1884, near the town of 

 Warwick, in Queensland, and described by Dr. S. A. Smith, of 

 Sydney, in December, 1916. The skull is that of a male youth, 

 a member of an extremely primitive race of men. 



Other evidence of man's antiquity are the famous ''human 

 footprints" found in the dune limestone, at Warrnambool, Vic- 

 toria. In these limestones, also, the footprints of an extinct 

 bird, Genyornis, have been found. There is also the much 

 debated "Buninyong bone," a fragment of rib-bone of an 

 extinct giant marsupial, cut to a knife-like shape by means of 

 a sharp instrument. I paid a visit to the Warrnambool 

 Museum to see the "footprints," and also, by courtesy of Sir 

 Baldwin Spencer, visited the crypt of the Melbourne National 

 Museum and saw the "bone." Both specimens are of great 

 interest, and the latter is most convincing. I forgot to men- 

 tion that the bone was found in a swamp deposit, near Ballarat, 

 238 feet below the level of the lava flow. I have also seen an 

 aboriginal stone implement, the finder of which — a Mr. 

 McKenna, a Victorian mine manager — told me that it was 



