New Britain herald., 1919-06-20
ROOSEVELT WROTE
 0F MISSING LINK
Told in Letter Of Ape-Man Of Java
 -ReCalled by Talking Ape

 sreports that Professor R. L. Garner, of the Smithsonian Institution of Washington D. C., has found in the French Congo a "man- monkey" or talking ape" lend interest to a com &munication sent by the late Theodore Roosevelt to the National Geographic society telling of the pre-human ape man of Java, who lived some 5oO,0OO years ago and marked an upward stage in the evolution of man.
 Colonel Roosevelt's famous jungle hunt was in the vicinity of Professor Gamers travels, as they are described in newspaper dispatches, and the Roosevelt big game is mounted in the Smithsonian Institution, with which Professor Garner is associated.
 Regar rding this "ape-man" of Java, one of the many missing links in human evolution, Colonel Roosevelt wrote to the National Geographic society:
 This being was already halfway upward from the beast, halfway be- tween true man and those Miocene an- cestors of his, who were still on the psychic and intellectual level of their diverging knsfolk, the anthropoid
 
 was in our own line of ascent during these uncounted ages when our an cestors were already different from all other brutes and yet had not grown to be really men. He probably used a stone or club at need; and about this time he may have begun very rudely to chip or otherwise fashion stones to his use.
 His progress was very, very slow; the marked feature in the progress of man has been it's great acceleration of rapidity in each successive stage, accompanied continually by an mex plica ble halt or dying out in race after race and culture after culture. After the ape-man of Java we skip a quarter of a million years or so be- fore We get our next glimpse of a 1 near-human predecessor of ours. This is the Heidelberg man, who lived in the warm second interglacial period, surrounded by a fauna of huge and fearsome beasts, which included the saber-tooth and the hippopotamus. and also the rhin oceroses and ele- plants of southern type.
 He was a chinless being, whose 1 jaw was still so primitive that it must 1 have made his speech imperfect; and 1 he was so much lower than any ex- 1 isting savage as to be at least speci- | fcally distinct-that is, he can be 1 called human" only if the word is l used with a certain largeness. | Again we make a long skip-tllis i time of somewhat over a hundred | thousand years-and come to the l Piltdovn man, or near-man-a being l ] than the men of Heidelberg, and in some ways less so. for he possessed apelil1e canine teeth.
 Tho next race was that of the Ne anderthal men, much more modern and more advanced but lower than any existing savage, and specifically distinct from modern man. This race ! dwelt in Europe, without other human l rivals, for an i'm period of time |; probably al least fifty thousand years; certainly an age several times IS long as the period included in the nterva between the earliest polished stone l men and ourselves-in other words several times as long as the ages of polished stone. bronze and iron and the total of historic times all put to- l gether.
 Some of their favorite caverns l were lived in by them and by their 1 successors for fifty thousand years. | At last the life term Of these prim = tive hunter folk drew to a close. They were not our ancestors. With oul present knowledge, it seems proba ble that they were exterminated as com. p1etely from Europe as in our owr day the Tasmanians were extermi mated from Tasmania.
 The most profound change in the whole racial (not culturaD history o. Western Europe was the sudden ant total supplanting of these sava ges [ lower than any existing human type by the tall, finely built CroLMa gn or race of hunters who, in intelligence evidently ranked high as compared with all but the very forem ost m cd err peoples and who belonged to the same species of men that we do--Homt sapiens."