l80 FROM FISH TO PHILOSOPHER 



had a common evolutionary origin, a view first set forth 

 in Huxley's famous essay entitled Mans Place in Nature, 

 published in 1863. The biological aflfinity between the 

 anthropoid apes and recent (as well as fossil) man is so 

 close that the Pongidae and Hominidae are today in- 

 cluded in a superf amily, the Hominoidea. 



Of the Hominidae, only one species— Homo sapiens, 

 or modem man, survives. In Huxley's time indubitable 

 human or related fossils were almost unknown and the 

 few suspected fragments could not be confidently classi- 

 fied. In the past century, however, these fossil fragments 

 have been unearthed in such numbers as to keep the 

 paleontologists and anthropologists busy describing 

 them, naming them, and generally hotly debating their 

 interrelations. But always these fossils have been either 

 man or ape, never man-ape— and the biologist has been 

 too acutely conscious of the importance of the 'missing 

 link' to find the subject very funny. 



Then in 1925 R. A. Dart discovered at Taungs, in 

 Bechuanaland, a fossil skull of a new 'anthropoid' which 

 he named Australopithecus africanus (African southern 

 ape), and which he suggested was closely related to the 

 human stem. (See Figure 11.) Since that date large 

 quantities of the fossilized remains of Australopithecus 

 have been collected from cave deposits at widely sep- 

 arated sites in the Transvaal. These fossils have precipi- 

 tated a lively debate, some paleo-anthropologists wholly 

 denying their human affinity, and contending them to 

 be the remains of advanced apehke forms closely allied 

 to the gorilla and chimpanzee. The most extreme opposi- 

 tion to Dart's interpretation has come from a minority 

 who believe that man was descended, not from an early 

 anthropoid-ape stem but from an unspecialized monkey- 

 hke quadruped which had not yet acquired the brachiat- 

 ing (arm-swinging) habitus and other anthropoid fea- 

 tures, and who sought (with scant warrant) to place 

 the separation of the hominid (or distinctly humanlike) 



