THE ANIMAL, MAN (ANTHROPOLOGY) 565 



outstanding differences between man and his animal relatives is his 

 insatiable intellectual curiosity, that leads him to speculate even upon 

 questions which he cannot always answer. Just wluni and where did 

 mankind graduate from the long drawn-out school of animal life, 

 and become qualified to be called human? Did man's emergence 

 from his animal ancestry occur once only in a hypothetical Garden of 

 Eden from which starting point he spread over the earth, as is in- 

 ferred to be the manner of origin generally assumed in the case of 

 different animal and plant species, or was the faint but important 

 original line of demarcation between animals and mail crossed 

 repeatedly in various localities by different ancestral lines, which 

 have contributed eventually to the compound make-up of what we 

 call a human being? No direct answer can be made now to the 

 question of human origin, nor in all probability can ever be made. 

 What difference does it make, when and where man first came upon 

 the stage? The important thing is that he has arrived and domi- 

 nates life on the earth today. 



Asia is regarded by many scientists as the probable original home 

 of humanity. One of the reasons for this opinion is the fact that the 

 vast continent of Asia is geographically adequate to have been the 

 region from which man set out to overcome the world. It has 

 a sufficiently large area and is now, or has been in the past, linked 

 by land bridges with other important land areas on the earth, which 

 would allow for human dispersal as we see it today. Moreover, 

 there is geological evidence that it has been continental land since 

 long before the Pleistocene Period, when the first known traces of 

 man appeared. The earliest civilizations marked by historical re- 

 mains, and the first known domestic animals also, are of Asiatic origin. 

 That famous quartet of the oldest authentic human fossils, namely 

 the Piltdowner of England, the Heidelberg Jaw of Germany, the 

 Peking skeletons of China, and the Ape-man from Java are all far 

 distant from the ancient central plateau of Asia. Dr. W. D. Matthews 

 has pointed out that in evolution the most highly specialized and the 

 most recent types of a series will be found distributed near their 

 point of origin, while the more primitive and older representatives 

 of a species, which have had more time to explore the world, will be 

 found farthest away from the original starting point. This is 

 "Matthews' Law," and it is borne out in the case of man, if Asia be 

 regarded as the "Garden of Eden" in which mankind began his 

 notable career. Naturally the spread of mankind, from whatever 



