CREATION BY EVOLUTION 



come to the much fuller record supplied by the fossils of the 

 Age of Mammals, estimated by Barrell to be about sixty 

 million years in duration, with its six great epochs — Palaeo- 

 cene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene. 



Origin and Evolution of the Primates, Including Man 



Throughout this enormously long period, which was short, 

 however, compared to some of its predecessors, the fossil 

 records are relatively abundant for some great orders of 

 mammals, such as the hoofed mammals, and extremely 

 meagre for the primates. In western North America at the 

 beginning of the Palaeocene epoch, some sixty million years 

 ago, there lived relatives of the existing tree shrews, and in 

 the next higher beds (Lower Eocene) we find the ancient 

 relatives of the lemurs and tarsioids, which are found also 

 in the Eocene of Europe. In the Lower Oligocene beds of 

 Egypt have been found two lower jaws of extraordinary 

 interest, one (Parapithecus) combining the characters of 

 the tarsioids and the anthropoids, the other representing a 

 primitive pro-anthropoid ancestral to the gibbons and per- 

 haps to the branch leading to the higher apes and man. In 

 the Miocene and Pliocene beds of India and Europe we 

 find the broken jaws of possibly a dozen kinds of anthropoid 

 apes, some of which (Dryopithecus) appear from the details 

 of their teeth to be closely related both to the existing 

 anthropoids and to man. In the Upper Pliocene beds we 

 find possible traces of early man in the shape of crude flint 

 implements; in the Pleistocene beds have been found the 

 remains of many individuals of the Neanderthal race in 

 Europe; also the famoifs skull of Pithecanthivpus, in Java. 

 In the closing stages of the Pleistocene epoch the modernized 

 Hojno sapiens appears. 



Although the fossil record of the evolution of the Primates 



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