Books: Non-Fiction

Mother of Continents

Some time ago, perhaps 15 million years, there were watery depressions in the enormous slab of territory that is now called Mongolia—reedy lakes along whose shores fed cold-blooded brutes of preposterous, hobgoblin shapes and proportions. Some were small, only eight or nine feet long, with skins no thicker than ordinary linoleum. Their necks were like fire-hose, ending in froggish heads. Their posteriors stuck out like a lizard's, into muscular tails. Their forelegs were futile flippers but astern were haunches like a bull ostrich, for swift, stooped running on webbed and clawed feet. Many of these creatures were vegetarians and some who grew to 18-and 20-foot lengths developed rounded bills, like a giant duck's, to fill their monstrous wrinkled paunches. Certain species, having laid in arsenals of teeth, were meateaters and not in the least squeamish about devouring their peaceful relatives. In time, one sensible clan specialized in defense, going always on all fours, with armor plate on a humpy back and a flange of skull spread back fanwise to protect the neck. On the forehead grew three horns; the upper lip hardened and hooked downward in a terrible beak.

By Mongolia's lakes and marshy meadows these creatures laid their reptilian eggs; roamed, fought and died, their heavy carcasses sometimes sinking into quicksands, or being dragged by currents into still backwaters, to settle in silt. . . . After perhaps eight million years, other creatures ruled Mongolia. They were warm-blooded, milk-giving, viviparous—mammals from tiny moles to a shaggy monster with columnar legs and a neck long enough to browse on treetops, a sort of elephantine giraffe. . . . After several millions of years there grew up in mammalia an erect Two-Legs who learned to use tools. . . .

Mongolia's climate changed. Dry winds shriveled the vegetation; drifting sand built hills on old lakebeds. What had once been a green animal paradise became a desert called Gobi, sparsely inhabited by a sturdy but backward breed of humans, together with herds of wild asses, antelopes, domesticated sheep and draft camels. The centuries passed. . . .

Poring over maps in Manhattan in the so-called 20th century, Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History put two enormous twos together and obtained a daring hypothetical four: similar fossils having been found in Europe and in western North America, there must have been a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska; central Asia had been the original point of dispersal of the animal kingdom, including mankind. Dr. Osborn mentioned the matter to his ablest zoologist and that young man, Roy Chapman Andrews, industriously raised half a million dollars to take a band of assorted scientists into the Gobi for five years of intensive digging. As every one knows, the Andrews expeditions have thus far unearthed sufficient in the way of dinosaur skeletons and eggs, rare baluchitheria and traces of Mousiterian man to substantiate Dr. Osborn's hypothesis in spectacular fashion (TIME, Oct. 29, 1923, et seq.). The program has been extended and paleontological portents impend for four years to come. "Asia is the mother of the continents."