Peabody Museum Helps Send Force "On Road To Mandalay" In Ancient Man Hunt

Into the far reaches of southeastern Asia, Java, and the Phillippines a 25,000 mile ancient man hunt started from New York yesterday, when Dr. and Mrs. Hellmut do Terra sailed for England on the S.S. Manhattan.

Co-sponsors of the expedition are the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and Harvard's Peabody Museum. With the leaders go Hallam L. Movius, research associate in Anthropology, of the Peabody, and Mrs. Movius, though they do not sail until the S.S. Bremen leaves New York on Saturday.

While de Terra, leader of the expedition, concerns himself primarily with the geological sequences and stratigraphy, and Dr. Teilhard du Chardin with the palcontology, Movius' duties will be the excavation of the Pieistocone terraces and other deposits which may yield implements or other remains of man.

Steamer, railroad, and motor car will carry the party to the town of Mandalay in Northern Burma, which will serve as a base of field operations. Here, with the cooperation of the Burma Division of the Geological Survey of India, the expedition will search the gravels along the banks of the Irrawaddi River for fossils of prehistoric man and animals. Stone Age tools have already been uncovered in this region.

Co-discoverer of Pekin Man, Pere Teilhard de Chardin, will join the expedition in Burma on December 1. With him two field trips will be made into the north above Myitkyina, which lies at the foot of the Chinese Alps, near the desolate wastes of Tibet.

These field trips will serve to reveal the role played by the mountain making events and climatic changes that occurred during the process of human evelution in southeastern Asia.

From Burma the expedition will travel by airplane to Singapore and Bandeong Java. There, joining forces with Dr. Halph von Koenigswald, they will explore new sites along the Solo River, where last year von Koenigswald discovered the skull of what is probably the oldest human in the world, a baby of 700,000 years ago.

As Java is rich with evidence of both prehistoric man and the animals that lived contemporancously with him, it offers an opportunity for the expedition to compare the age of early man there with finds in other parts of the world.

Particularly interesting to de Terra is the likelihood of an ancient bridge that may have existed between Malaya and the Asiatic continent which would shed light further on early human migrations between India and Java.

Final scenes of field work will be at the Phillippines, where a survey will be made of the coastal plain near Manila reported to be rich with fossils, perhaps those of the same animals which were recovered with a Java and Pekin Man. If true, such a find would be most valuable in the study of animal migrations form southeastern Asia toward the new World.

By combining their forces, the Academy of Natural Sciences and the Peabody Museum are sending into the field one of the best manned search parties ever organized.

The expedition is a direct result of the discussions arising at the International Symposium on Early Man, held at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in celebration of its 125th anniversary last March.

With the addition of de Chardin and von Koenigswald it promises to discover further evidence of man's age, origin, and the animals that existed with or before him.