Cultural Status of the South African 



Man-Apes 



By Raymond A. Dart 



Head, Department of Anatomy 



Medical School, University of the Witwatersrand 



Johannesburg, South Africa 



[With 4 plates] ' \ 

 DARWIN'S AFRICAN HYPOTHESIS 



EiGiiTT-nvE years ago, in "The Descent of Man," Darwin (1871, 

 pp. 240-242) noted that in each great region of the world the living 

 mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. 

 As the chimpanzee and gorilla are man's nearest living mammalian 

 relatives, he announced his belief that our early progenitors lived on 

 the African Continent. 



At that time one fossil ape, called Dryopifhecus and believed to be 

 akin to the living gibbon, was known from the Miocene epoch (10 

 to 35 million years ago) in Europe. A very early human skull with 

 a thick vault, jutting upper jaw, and large bony ridges over the eyes 

 had also been blasted out of a cave at Gibraltar in 1848. As this 

 event had occurred 11 years before the theory of evolution was put 

 forward by Darwin in "The Origin of Species," nobody had taken 

 any serious notice of this skull except Lieutenant Flint ; he saved the 

 specimen and entered it in the catalog of the Gibraltar Scientific 

 Society. Twelve years later events had occurred that caused Dr. Busk 

 to take it to England, when he found it lying neglected in Gibraltar. 



Even when a second fossil human skull of the same type, called 

 the Neanderthal skull, was discovered in 1857 in a limestone cave near 

 Dilsseldorf, the great German pathologist Virchow declared that it 

 was merely the cranium of an idiot. Today the proofs of evolution 

 are known to all educated people; and many examples of this same 

 fundamental Neanderthal type of fossil mankind or its near relations 

 are known from Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Palestine, 

 Iran, Java, Tanganyika, Rhodesia, and Cape Town. Collectively 

 they typify the neanderthaline phase of human evolution. 



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