“Thus comparative anatomy proves to the satisfaction of every
unprejudiced and critical student the significant fact that the body of
man and that of the anthropoid ape are not only peculiarly similar, but
they are practically one and the same in every important respect. The
same two hundred bones, in the same order and structure, make up our
inner skeleton; the same three hundred muscles effect our movements;
the same hair clothes our skin; the same groups of ganglionic cells
build up the marvellous structure of our brain; the same four-chambered
heart is the central pulsometer in our circulation; the same thirty-two
teeth are set in the same order in our jaws; the same salivary,
hepatic, and gastric glands compass our digestive process; the same
reproductive organs insure the maintenance of our race.”
Like human beings, these apes stand from three to six feet tall; like
human beings, they weigh from one hundred to three hundred pounds;
like human beings, they have only a rudimentary tail of from three to
five joints imbedded at the extremity of the spine; like human beings,
they stand on their hind legs and grasp things with their hands; like
human beings, they live in families; like human beings, they are brave,
quarrelsome, impulsive, emotional, and capable of a limited exercise of
reason.
In their native forests, apes laugh, sing, dance, and converse with one
another. Their language is a series of sounds with definite meanings.
[Illustration: FIG. 22.—THE RING-TAILED LEMUR OF MADAGASCAR.]
Yet it is not held that man has descended from any of these existing
anthropoid apes. What is held is that these creatures and human beings
represent two different lines of development from the same ancestors.
But what of the “missing link” between the early ape-like creatures
and primitive man? In 1891, Dr. Eugene Dubois, a Dutch military
physician, found near Trinil, in Java, some interesting bones and some
teeth. The International Zoological Congress, held at Leyden in 1894,
voted that these bones had belonged to a form intermediary between
ape-like creatures and men. The creature was named the Pithecanthropus
Erectus—the erect ape-man.
Fig. 30 (upper) shows a restoration of the skull of this ape-like
human being, placed, to facilitate comparison, above the skull of a
modern man. The formation of the skull of this creature represents a
decided advance over any existing anthropoid ape; but the prominent
supra-orbital ridges, the low, retreating forehead, and the massive,
prognathous jaws, which gave a brutish angle to the face, are
distinctly ape-like characteristics.
[Illustration: FIG. 23.—THE SLOW LORIS—ANOTHER TYPE OF LEMUR.
There are fifty known species of the lemur, of which thirty-six belong
to Madagascar. The others are found in Africa and South-Eastern Asia.
They were formerly much more widely distributed, and many fossil lemurs
have been found in North America.]
The most interesting feature of this primitive creature’s approach
to man was the volume of his brain. The quantity of the brain of
the highest ape measures about 600 cubic centimetre units. In some
Australian “black fellows” the brain capacity runs as low as 900 units,
while in others it reaches 1500. The brains of civilized men vary in
bulk from 1000 to 2000 units, which gives 1500 cubic centimetres as the
brain capacity of the average man. Now the skull of the Pithecanthropus
Erectus shows that his brain measured nearly a 1000 cubic centimetres.
In other words, the brain capacity of this primitive ape-man was about
equal to that of some of the exceptionally low existing savages, and
somewhat less than midway between that of the highest anthropoid ape
and the average civilized man. This man lived some 500,000 years ago.
Men of science believe that the first human beings arose in Southern
Asia, if not, indeed, in a region still more southerly than the present
Asiatic boundary—in Lemuria, the former land extension now submerged
beneath the Indian Ocean. The evidence of fossils supports this view.
And it is significant that the bones of the ape-man of Java were found
on the very edge of the Indian Ocean.
From Asia, the rude forefathers of our race migrated over the earth.
Asia was then united to Africa, and joined hands with Europe at the
Dardanelles and Sicily, and with North America at Behring Strait.
Other land connections joined Africa to Europe at Gibraltar and flung
a broad thoroughfare from the Dark Continent to Australia. Over these
land routes and others some of our naked ancestors in humanity’s early
dawn wandered from the cradle of the race in Asia and took up their
habitations in the different continents and in the islands of the seas.
[Illustration: FIG. 24.—THE BABOON.
There are numerous species of the Baboon as of the other “true apes”—a
name applied to them as animals that run on all fours. The Baboons
are now confined to Africa and Arabia, though they formerly inhabited
India. They have short tails, short, strong limbs, hands and feet
remarkably like human hands and feet, and well-developed brains.
They go in troops, following the lead of a patriarch and guarded by
a sentinel. They attack other animals and make raids on property.
“They are sometimes caught by being intoxicated with liquor purposely
exposed near their haunts, fondness for stimulants being one of their
often observed vices.”—“Chamber’s Encyclopaedia.” “The Anubis Baboons,
as shown by the frescoes, were tamed by the ancient Egyptians and
trained to pluck sycamore figs from the trees.”—“The Encyclopaedia
Britannica.”]
Since 1848, numerous fossil remains of man have been found, first,
at Gibraltar, and later in Germany, Belgium, France, England, the
Caucasus, Africa, and North and South America. These bones, which range
from fragments of skulls, jaws and teeth to entire skeletons, represent
various stages of human development from ape-like creatures to modern
man. The possessors of some of these bones were “missing links” in our
ancestry.
In 1911, a remarkable skull, which is believed to be approximately
400,000 years old, was found at Piltdown, in Sussex, England. This
skull is essentially human in its smooth forehead, the absence of
bulging ridges over the eyes, and in the development of the bones of
the brain case. The brain it held was about equal in size to that of
the savages of Australia. Yet it is remarkably flat and very thick,
like that of an anthropoid ape. The teeth are longer than in modern man
and bulging, and the prominent canines are distinctly ape-like, while
the chin retreats in heavy jaws. Uniting as he did such decidedly human
and ape-like characters, the owner of this skull, the Piltdown man, has
been described as “man in the making” and called the “dawn man.”
[Illustration: FIG. 25.—THE WHITE-HANDED GIBBON
The Gibbon, of which there are many species, is found in Assam, the
Malay Peninsula, Java, Sumatra and Borneo. The animal is remarkable
for its agility and for the weird cries with which it makes the
woods resound at night. The above illustration and the following
illustrations of anthropoid apes are reproduced from Professor Ernst
Haeckel’s great work “The Evolution of Man,” with the permission of the
publishers, Watts & Co., London.]
In the Maure sands, near Heidelberg, in 1907, there was found, in a
perfect state of preservation, a complete jaw with the teeth. The
relic belonged to a member of the Heidelberg race—a very low type of
human being. Speaking of this discovery in his “Men of the Old Stone
Age,”; Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, after describing it as “one
of the most important in the whole history of anthropology,” says it
is “unquestionably human from the nature of the teeth,” and adds that
it “ranks not far from the point of separation between man and the
anthropoid apes.” Professor Osborn estimates the age of this human
relic at about 250,000 years.
The Heidelberg race was followed by the Neanderthal race, which
entered Europe probably from Africa. All the physical features of
Neanderthal man (Fig 31), unite in constituting him a “distinct species
of man.” Though he bore in his body the obvious marks of his simian
origin—heavy, overhanging eyebrows, a markedly retreating forehead,
large jaws and a diminutive chin—he nevertheless possessed a signal
advantage over every earlier race of creatures. He had a large head,
and in the cavern of his skull he carried the largest and best brain
that had so far appeared in Europe. In stature, the Neanderthal man was
short, broad shouldered, stocky; his arms and legs were muscular and
powerful and his hands large.
[Illustration: FIG. 26.—A FEMALE GORILLA.
The gorilla is the largest of the man-like apes. It is distinguished
from the other anthropoids by its small thumb, small ears, elongated
head, a deep groove alongside the nostrils and other features. The
gorilla is a black animal whose home is in West Equatorial Africa. The
outstanding great toe of the gorilla and the other anthropoid apes is
found, though in a less pronounced condition, among savage tribes of
Asia. See the photograph of “One of the ‘Monkey Men’” in an article on
the Malekula tribes in “Asia, The American Magazine On The Orient,” for
June, 1921. Of this savage, Mr. Martin Johnson, the Asiatic explorer,
says: “He could grasp a branch with his great flat feet as easily as I
could with my hands.”]
The Neanderthal people spread over Croatia, Austria, Hungary, Germany,
Switzerland, Belgium, France and England; and in the soil of all those
countries, buried now in some places to a depth of forty feet below the
actual surface, they left millions of imperishable memorials of their
handiwork—weapons and tools made from chipped flint and other kinds of
stone—sharp weapons for throwing and cutting, and tools for dressing
skins and shaving wood.
Contemporary with this early race in the wilds of Europe, were the
hippopotamus and rhinoceros, the cave bear and hyena, the woolly
mammoth, the giant deer, the bison, the sabre-toothed tiger and other
long since extinct creatures. These the Neanderthals hunted, eating
their flesh, splitting the larger bones for the marrow, opening the
skulls for the brains, making anvils of the large, flat bones, and in
the cold winters clothing themselves with the skins. This and more is
evidenced to-day by the numerous bones of these animals which are found
associated with the tools which Neanderthal man used at least 200,000
years ago.
Turning their attention to art, these people made drawings on bones and
stones of various animals and human beings. The human forms are always
represented in the nude, and it is noteworthy that they invariably show
signs of being covered with hair.
[Illustration: FIG. 27.—MALE GIANT GORILLA.
Killed by H. Paschen, at Yaunde, in the interior of the Cameroons, and
stuffed by Umlauff.]
The Neanderthal race had its day and disappeared from Europe. Perhaps
it was greatly reduced by the rigors of the fourth glacial period.
Perhaps its remaining numbers were decimated in wars with a superior
people; for that superior people was at hand.
Some 25,000 years ago, a new race—the Cro-Magnon people—invaded
Europe. These people were from Asia. They belonged to a stock totally
different from the Neanderthals from whom they wrested a continent.
Tall in physique, with high, straight foreheads, and large, well formed
brains, they were a hardy race of hunters and the most intelligent
and progressive race the world then knew. Their superior industry in
the working of flint everywhere superseded the Neanderthal. They had
imagination, ideals, and knew the customs of civilized life. They were
artists with a high sense of beauty and proportion. Their carvings on
bone implements, their sculptures, and the realistic paintings on the
walls of their caves represent an art whose delicate finish and superb
proportion remained unrivalled in its field until the reign of the
Greeks. They decorated their dead with strings of perforated shells,
and with them buried flint weapons and offerings of food. Writing of
these people with evident enthusiasm, Professor John M. Tyler, in “The
New Stone Age in Northern Europe,” observes: “The Cro-Magnon people
have excited the wonder and admiration of all anthropologists.”
[Illustration: FIG. 28.—THE BALDHEADED CHIMPANZEE.
The Chimpanzee is a native of West and Central Equatorial Africa.
“There are various races or varieties of Chimpanzee, and all of them
show a degree of black pigmentation. In one variety the skin becomes
totally black; in another, pigmentation of the face and of other
parts, is delayed until late in life; in others the face never becomes
absolutely black.”—“Man, a History of the Human Body,” by Dr. Arthur
Keith.]
In the Cro-Magnons evolution had at last produced a race of real
men—men with well moulded heads, with large, competent brains, with a
straight facial angle, with well formed jaws and teeth and chin, with
manly eyes looking out beneath an intellectual brow and lighting up a
face whose whole contour was rugged but thoroughly human.
Other races came upon the scene, and there was a mingling of races
and a clashing of cultures; but the Cro-Magnons, though they declined
in numbers, persisted, and became, as is believed, one of the lineal
ancestral races of modern man.
The geographical centre of the European distribution of the Cro-Magnon
people was at Dordogne, in southwestern France, and in the present
inhabitants of Dordogne, of Brittany, and of other districts in France
are found essentially the same skull formation, features and complexion
as were characteristic of this remarkable type of prehistoric man.
Of this unique racial continuity, Prof. Ripley, in his learned work
on “The Races of Europe,” says: “It is, perhaps, the most striking
instance known of a persistency of population unchanged through
thousands of years.”
[Illustration: FIG. 29.—THE SKELETON OF MAN AND OF THE FOUR ANTHROPOID
APES.
From Haeckel’s “Evolution of Man.” From left to right the order of the
skeletons is as follows: Gibbon, Orang, Chimpanzee, Gorilla, Man.]
The evolution of animal life was paralleled by the rise of an equal
diversity of forms in the vegetable world. From the Monera—organisms
so lowly that it cannot be determined whether they are plant or
animal—life diverged in opposite directions, producing, on the one
hand, the plant, on the other, the animal. Organisms that could feed
on inorganic matter assumed a stationary character and became the
ancestors of the plants. Creatures that required organic food developed
powers of locomotion to facilitate the search for sustenance, and of
these were born the varied forms of earth’s animal population. From
the first microscopic plants, vegetable life proceeded to seaweed,
to mosses, to ferns, to the pine and the yew, to the vines, the
fruit-bearing and flowering plants that crowd the forests and beautify
the gardens of the world.
The truth of this wonderful story of evolution, of the progressive
improvement of living forms with the advance of time, is proved by
several lines of evidence. One of these lines of evidence is found in
the fossil remains of the life of earlier times. Fossils are relics of
forms that lived in the long ago. Dying, they were buried in sediment
by the hand of time, and to-day they are found in rock formations,
where they have been preserved from the destructive power of the ages.
Now, if living things have developed in an increasing variety of
forms as time has gone on, and if the stratified rocks of the earth’s
crust, as they have grown from age to age, have kept a record of these
living things, these testimonies of the rocks must prove the gradual
unfoldment of the world’s life. Such precisely is the case. The earlier
rocks are poor in fossils, because in the earlier ages the world was
poor in life; but in the succeeding rocks, there is a larger deposit of
fossils; and the rocks of every progressively later age show an ever
increasing wealth of fossil remains.
[Illustration: FIG. 30.—SKULL OF THE FOSSIL APE-MAN OF JAVA.
(_Pithecanthropus Erectus._)