THE EXTINCT APES AND THEIR BEAR- 

 ING UPON THE ANTIQUITY OF THE 

 HOMINID^E 



By A. G. THACKER, A.R.C.Sc. 

 Curator, Public Museum, Gloucester 



It is a matter of common knowledge that although the great 



discoveries of the last sixty years have swept away all the old 



conceptions of the recent origin of man, those discoveries have 



not thus far provided anything approaching a definite solution 



of the problem of the age of mankind. Indeed, the divergence 



of opinion among scientists is probably greater to-day than it 



has ever been. And my object in this paper is to approach 



the question from a point of view which appears to have been 



somewhat forgotten of late, although recent discoveries tend to 



emphasise its importance. I propose to deal with the antiquity 



of the stock from which mankind is believed to have arisen. 



At the outset it should be noted that the phrase " the 



antiquity of man " is a highly ambiguous one ; it may mean 



either of two very different things. On the one hand the 



expression may refer to the date of the origin of the existing 



species of man — true man — whilst on the other hand it may 



denote the length of time which is supposed to have elapsed 



since our ancestors ceased to be arboreal and became mainly 



ground-living creatures, with the consequent transformation 



of the hinder hands into feet ; for the foot is the chief peculiarity 



of the Hominidae, and hence any ape-like being who possessed 



feet could lay some claim to humanity. This distinction is 



germane to my present subject, because, firstly, the known 



antiquity of our own species is a very different thing from the 



known antiquity of the four fossil species of the human tribe, 



and because, also, we must recognise that whilst the existence of 



apes in any given period has virtually no bearing upon the 



antiquity of real man, it has a most important bearing upon 



the probable date of the appearance of those half-human 



creatures who were his forerunners. 



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