ABSTRACT
The remote ancestral background of the Malay has to be constructed from skulls and palaeoliths excavated in Mongolia and at Pekin and from the river terraces of Java, and it has to be corroborated for later centuries by study of the neoliths and extant primitive tribes of the Malay world. From the beginning of the Pleistocene (or Ice Age) about one million years ago, when the Malay peninsula became linked with Java, Sumatra and Borneo, the mandibles of two giant forerunners of man have survived, namely those of the Java Giant (Pithecanthropus palaeo-javanicus) with a head as large as that of an adult male gorilla and the Ape-Man of Modjokerto (Pithecanthropus modjokertensis or robustus). From the Middle Pleistocene date the remains of Java’s famous Pithecanthropus erectus), the erect forerunner of Neanderthal man, found at solo along with the remains of a primitive elephant, a Stegodon, a hippopotamus, a Cryptomastodon and two species of rhinoceros. Later still from the beginning of the Upper Pleistocene come eleven skull-caps and two thigh-bones of a larger and more highly developed pithecanthropoid, the Man from Solo (Homo Soloensis), who camped on river-banks and used rough stone implements of yellow chalcedony, a cannibal apparently who split the skulls of his victims. He is no longer accompanied by the Stegodon, the elephant, the hippopotamus and the antelope but a prehistoric Gaur and water-buffalo abound in his vicinity. Finally, there is the man from Wajak (Homo wadjakensis), claimed as the ancestor of an Australvid skull from Keilor, near Melbourne. Though still larger than any man today, the Wajak man yet has the teeth of Homo Sapiens
