Science: Diggers

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"Six inches deep in the lake gravel floor was found the buried skeleton of an infant. The bones were very immature. Beside the skeleton lay a sharp bone 'dagger.' At this level also were found some very small projectile points, possibly dart heads and knives, scrapers and bone awls. . . . There can be no question that these people preceded by several thousand years the earliest Basket Makers."

The find thus announced last week by Dr. Julian H. Steward of the Smithsonian Institution was made in a cave near Utah's Great Salt Lake. As the water level in the lake sank, millennium after millennium, the caves around it are supposed to have been eaten out by the action of waves at the shore. The cave which yielded up Dr.Steward's fossil infant is now 365 ft. above the lake level. Yet the fact that the skeleton was imbedded in lake gravel on the cave floor indicated that the cave was inhabited soon after the water retreated from its mouth. Bits of charcoal showed the inhabitants to be fire makers. Dr. Steward viewed the skeleton as an important link between the well-known Basket Makers and the mysterious, much earlier "Folsom Men" whose bodily remains have not been found although they left an abundance of their characteristic "Folsom points"—stone weapons with a shallow groove chipped out on each side of the blade. Dr. Steward estimated the age of the Salt Lake child at 5,000 to 12,000 years.

Other recent news of archeology and paleontology:

France. In the winding, pleasant valley of the Loire, every year for twelve years the plow of Farmer Jean Gonon struck a hard object at the same spot. He finally dug it up, found it was a marble statue of a woman, lugged it home with difficulty since it weighed almost 200 Ib. Experts pronounced it a masterpiece of Greek art, a lush Venus probably inspired by the school of Pheidias (450-400 B.C.). The right arm is broken off at the shoulder; the left holds draperies which loop down below the belly. The legs are missing below the knees. Most of the nose is missing which makes the profile unpleasant.

China. The first skull of Peking Man was found in 1929 in limestone caves at Choukoutien, 20 mi. from Peiping. This apish oldster is now generally conceded to be 1,000,000 years old, most ancient of known human fossils. Last summer, two days before Sino-Japanese fighting broke out in north China, a native workman employed by the Rockefeller-endowed diggers at Choukoutien turned up an upper jawbone of Peking Man, containing six teeth. This was the first upper jawbone, although several skulls and lower jawbones had been found before. The new find was got safely to a museum in spite of the fighting. Dr. Ralph Works Chaney, University of California paleontologist who had concluded from ancient garbage in the cave that Peking Man ate hackberries, now considered the evidence of upper and lower teeth together, decided therefrom that he was a meat eater as well as a consumer of hackberries.