744 GENETICS AND EVOLUTION 



Figure 36.6. Reconstruction of the skull of the man-ape Australopithecus. (Clark: 

 The History of the Primates.) 



and heavy jaws, but the brain capacity was large, 650 ml., greater than 

 that of any known ape and almost as large as that of the earliest ape 

 man. The cheekbone, jaw hinge and teeth were very similar to man's; 

 the small canine teeth and molars resemble ours. These man apes lived 

 in caves, hunted animals, and may have learned how to use fire. From 

 the structure of the pelvis and leg bones, and from the fact that the 

 foramen magnum (the hole in the skull through which the spinal cord 

 emerges) is located far under the skull, we conclude that these man apes 

 had a fairly erect posture. The largest of the australopithecines, the 

 Swartkrans man ape found in 1949, appears to have been a veritable 

 giant, larger and heavier than the largest gorillas. 



323. Fossil Ape Men 



The human stock appears to have diverged from the great apes 

 some time after the Miocene, and the remains of a number of creatures 

 with characters intermediate between the fossil apes and living man 

 have been found in Pliocene and Pleistocene deposits in widely scattered 

 parts of Europe, Asia and Africa (Fig. 36.7). The evidence from these 

 fossils indicates that the characteristics which distinguish man from the 

 apes did not appear simultaneously in a single form, for these ape men 

 show a mixture of apelike and human traits. Whether these are apes 

 or men is, perhaps, a matter of definition, but they were large-brained 

 anthropoids who walked erect, had well formed hands, and made and 

 used tools. We have a fairly clear idea of what these ape men looked 

 like from their fossil remains, and we also know quite a bit about how 

 they lived from the tools, weapons, ornaments, and other cultural re- 

 mains that have been discovered. 



One of the most primitive ape men was PitJiecanthropus erectus, 



