HUMAN ORGANIC EVOLUTION: FACT OR FANCY? 



with those current today. Finally, it might be worth while to 

 speculate not so much on the "goodness" or "fit" of evolu- 

 tionary theory as such, but rather on whether the theory, in 

 the absence of any other, fulfills the requirements of scientific 

 theories in general. 



The Fossil Record 



Anthropology was relatively slower than the other life scien- 

 ces in accepting the proposition that man's ancestor did not 

 look like modern man. In fact, some of the fossil finds in the 

 latter part of the last century (Cro-Magnon, 1868) seemed to 

 contradict all that Darwin had said, and suggested that man 

 had always been as he now is. But two major events in human 

 paleontology changed this rather narrow conception: First, 

 there was the discovery in the Neanderthal cave in 1856 of 

 a scull cap, which did not immediately influence the thinking 

 of the times while later and similar finds had a tremendous 

 impact upon current thought. Second, the discovery of a 

 primitive fossil in 1891 by the Dutch physician Dubois in 

 Java, in a stratigraphic level with faunal assemblages which 

 seemed to relate it to the middle pleistocene. Since this time, 

 many more fossils have been found and the great antiquity 

 of man which seemed at first highly improbable, has taken 

 on more and more credibility. It may be well then to consider 

 the fossil evidence which has so profoundly contributed to this 

 change, not chronologically as it accumulated through the past 

 sixty years or so, but as current taxonomists arrange the 

 evidence.^ 



One may begin with an examination of the fossilized remains 

 of man's nearest relative morphologically speaking, the anthro- 

 poid apes. These appear in Pliocene and Miocene deposits 

 over wide areas of the old world, from sites in Europe, India, 

 and Africa. The two fossils from Siwalik deposits in India 

 {Bramapithecus and Ramapithecus) seem to approximate more 



The fossil evidence has been summarized and carefully presented by 

 Clark, himself an anthropopaleontologist, whose descriptions and inter- 

 pretations of the taxonomic status of fossil remains have been used 

 here. His work, The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution, Chicago, 

 1955, contains also a detailed bibliography of the original sources 

 from which conclusions are drawn. 



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