Evening star., 1938-12-31

towards the human cerebral pat
tern. Some of its teeth were de-
cidedly human. The common an
cestor of both man and the apes,
DR.. Gregory pointed out. now is re-
garded as represented by two ex-
tinct apelike families of Europe
and Asia. the dryopithecus and the
sivapithecus, who lived in the period
preceding the great ice ages. The
South African creatures throw new
light on this hypothetical ancestry.
1T has always been difficult to
understand" DR.. Gregory said, why
man should show 50 many curious
and detailed anatomical agreements
with the orangs, in spite of the
enormous difference in locomotor
habits. The answer may we'll be
that orang and man may have di-
verged very profoundly and very
rapidly from a more chimpanzee-
like ancestor and that the austral-
opithecinae, Gas the South African
creatures have been named, have
such mixture of characters be-
cause they were late pleistocene sur
vivors Of the common dryopithecus
stock and were truly related to all
their cousins of the modern CHM
panzee-gorilla. orang and human
branches"
The ancient South Africans, he
points out, were contemporaries of
early man and hence could not be
ancestors. They must be considered,
he said, conservative cousins of
man and progressive cousins of the
great apes. They may be related,
and not very distantly either, to the
orangs on one side and the human
branch on the other"
They differed profoundly from the
existing great apes, he says, in being
hunters and meat eaters. The apes
are all fruit and cane eaters. Their
sharp canine teeth are ideally
adapted to this sort of food. On
the other hand primitive men have
small, almost incisorlike canine
teeth to grab hold parts of the
carcasses of animals and nearly fiat
topped molar teeth to grind flesh
and small bones.
1t is clear, DR.. Gregory says, that
these stay-at-home cousins were in
an intermediate stage. They lived,
he explained, in an open country
which was much the same as it Is
today, and may have chased away
the vultures and hyenas and filled
themselves with the remnants of the
lions feasts. From the abundance
of broken baboon skulls In their
caves they probably killed balloons
and cracked open the skulls like big
nuts to get at the brains"
$1,000 Award Made.
The annual $1,000 award of the
American Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science was awarded
today to DR.. Norman r. F.. Maier,
psychologist Of the University of
Michigan, for a paper presented
here Tuesday on the experimental
production of neurotic behavior in
rats.
In his experiment, details of which
were explained fully in Tuesdays
Star, DR.. Maier was able to produce
strange kind Of madness, possibly
akin to some types of insanity in
human beings, by getting his rats
in q state of complete confusion over
the perpledties of life and then
forcing them to act by the pressure
Of blast Of compressed air.
The creatures went into convul-
sions and then lapsed into comas.
In awarding the prize, the COM
mittee of the association commend
ed DR.. Maier on his conservatism
in refraining from actually drawing
an analogy between the demonstra-
BILE behavior of the rats and the
problematical behavior Of human
beings. In the latter fields, how
ever, "they may ultimately be vastly
significant" the committee stated.
The committee also expressed the
hope that DR.. Maier will employ
judiciously the moving pictures
which 80 strikingly illustrate his
work, for they may easily lend them.
selves to sensationalism II CONNER
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