Science: Ape Woman

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It was a restless day in the African Kamerun. Elephants had passed. The apes fidgeted in the trees. Along came a hunter. Through the leaves he sighted a sleek black form. Game. He shot. A screech, not animal, and out of the branches flopped a Negress, dead, naked, devoid of tribal tattoos. Apparently apes had reared her from infancy. Clumsily she had learned to climb, to sleep hammock-wise across two stout branches, to eat fruits, to jabber, to live their life.

The report of the incident, made last week by a Kamerun plantation manager to his Berlin employers, did not mention an autopsy. Such autopsy, to show whether or not she had ever borne children, would have been invaluable to science.

Men have long theorized over the hybridization of Hominidae and their cognate Catarrhini (turned-down noses) the Simiidae. Such cross-breeding would be a test of evolution. If children resulted, that would show that the two anthropoid groups were nearer each other than evolutionists at present believe.

The French, at the Pasteur Institute of Kindia, French West Africa, three years ago indicated their daring to make such tests. What results, if any, they had, so far they have kept secret. Nearly three years ago, also, Dr. Serge Voronoff, gland grafter, implanted human female sex organs in Nora, happy chimpanzee and artificially impregnated her. Nora apparently conceived. But no baby was born.