MAN 179 



through the Pleistocene, cuhninated in the uplift to their 

 present altitudes of the Himalaya, Andes, Rocky Moun- 

 tains, and the Alps. As this disturbance raised Eurasia 

 and buckled its ancient, eroded mountain remnants into 

 new and jagged peaks, that continent, in common with 

 other areas in the Northern Hemisphere, was subjected 

 to refrigeration presaging the glaciation of the Pleisto- 

 cene. In that part of Central Europe lying between the 

 Scandinavian ice to the north and the Alpine glaciers to 

 the south, the mean annual temperature fell below the 

 freezing point, while China and India, except in the ex- 

 treme south, were probably not much warmer. Although 

 the summers may have had a few short warm spells, the 

 winters were severe. As the climate became less hospi- 

 table and the forests dwindled in size in the late PHocene, 

 the dryopithecine apes came to an end in Eurasia while 

 their cousins continued to flourish in the African forests, 

 which at that time extended northward to the shores of 

 the Mediterranean. Darwin held that Africa was prob- 

 ably the home of the ancestors of man, and subsequent 

 discoveries have fully supported this belief, though the 

 available information throws no light on whether the 

 critical phase of his evolution transpired in the forests or 

 the plains. 



The evolutionary missing Hnk' between the apes and 

 man was for long so conspicuous by its absence that it 

 became a subject for jokesters who had a gap of their 

 own to fill. The biologist is now at no disadvantage in 

 respect to the hxmiorist's ancestry, or his own. The family 

 tree begins somewhere among the dryopithecine apes of 

 the Pliocene, some 5,000,000 to 10,000,000 years ago— 

 so far back in time that a detailed search of the sparse 

 fossil record would be of little moment here. From a 

 common dryopithecine stock there evolved two biologi- 

 cal families, the Pongidae or anthropoid apes, and the 

 Hominidae or manlike creatures. The close similarity 

 between the Pongidae and modem man led Darwin*s 

 friend, Thomas Henry Huxley, to conclude that they had 



