456 
DARWINISM 
CHAP. 
had diverged from each other. Now, this divergence almost 
certainly took place as early as the Miocene period, because in 
the Upper Miocene deposits of Western Europe remains of two 
species of ape have been found allied to the gibbons, one of 
them, Dryopithecus, nearly as large as a man, and believed by 
M. Lartet to have approached man in its dentition more than 
the existing apes. We seem hardly, therefore, to have reached, 
in the Upper Miocene, the epoch of the common ancestor of 
man and the anthropoids. 
The evidence of the antiquity of man himself is also scanty, 
and takes us but very little way back into the past. We 
have clear proof of his existence in Europe in the latter stages 
of the glacial epoch, with many indications of his presence in 
interglacial or even pre-glacial times; while both the actual 
remains and the works of man found in the auriferous gravels 
of California deep under lava-flows of Pliocene age, show that 
he existed in the New World at least as early as in the 
Old. 1 These earliest remains of man have been received 
with doubt, and even with ridicule, as if there were some 
extreme improbability in them. But, in point of fact, 
the wonder is that human remains have not been found 
more frequently in pre-glacial deposits. Referring to the 
most ancient fossil remains found in Europe--—the Engis 
and Neanderthal crania,—Professor Huxley makes the follow¬ 
ing weighty remark: “In conclusion, I may say, that the 
fossil remains of Man hitherto discovered do not seem to me 
to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by 
the modification of which he has, probably, become what he 
is. ” The Californian remains and works of art, above referred 
to, give no indication of a specially low form of man ; and it 
remains an unsolved problem why no traces of the long line 
of man’s ancestors, back to the remote period when he first 
branched off from the pithecoid type, have yet been discovered. 
It has been objected by some writers — notably by Professor 
Boyd Dawkins —that man did not probably exist in Pliocene 
times, because almost all the known mammalia of that epoch 
are distinct species from those now living on the earth, 
and that the same changes of the environment which led to 
1 For a sketch of the evidence of Man’s Antiquity in America, see The 
Nineteenth Century for November 1887. 
