MAN 59 



bones and in the foot gave to man the ease and grace of a 

 truly upright posture. 



Only a few decades ago it was charged by the critics of 

 the animal origin of man that only vacuous theories con- 

 cerning his origin could be presented because the fossil rec- 

 ord was entirely inadequate. Such may have been the case 

 at the turn of the century, but it is certainly not true at 

 present. Now human fossils number in the hundreds, com- 

 plete skeletons in some cases and parts of females, males, and 

 young. The primates in general, being forest-dwellers where 

 in the wet surroundings flesh and bones alike are destroyed 

 quickly, have left such a poor record (the chimpanzee and 

 gorilla hardly none) that it is rather amazing we have so 

 much for man. The record is more than enough to prove 

 man's derivation from an ape-like stock; it is not enough to 

 set up a family-tree of ascent. It may be that we will never 

 have a sufficient record for an exacting study of all human 

 connections in which the answer to the question of modern 

 racial differences would be fully satisfactory to all investi- 

 gators. Such a thorough study can actually be made on 

 some fossil records, notably that of the plains animals like 

 the horse. Here under the dry, dusty conditions of the 

 habitat, bones were easily fossilized, and the record is very 

 abundant. We do not need, however, many more records 

 for man than we have, since our real concern is to realize 

 fully that man is a part of an evolutionary process in which 

 all the cosmos is involved. 



We now have in the fossils of man-apes from Africa what 

 appears to be a real subhuman link with the anthropoid 

 stock. These fossils began to appear about 1925 when Ray- 

 mond Dart received a small skull that had been blasted out 

 of a quarry near Taungs in South Africa. Dart thought that 

 this skull was definitely intermediate between apes and man. 

 Most scientists thought he had made a blunder. They felt 

 that, since the skull was that of a youngster and since even 

 today the skulls of infant apes and man show greater sim- 



