318 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1955 



Darwin was not distressed by the apparent gap between living apes 

 and mankind caused by the contemporary lack of illustrative fossils. 

 He knew that the persistence of the anthropoid apes themselves into 

 modern times was accidental; he realized it would only be a matter 

 of time before they and all the great game, and even the races of man- 

 kind, which could not adapt themselves to human civilization, would 

 be exterminated. Once man had succeeded in his self-imposed task 

 of obliterating from the earth all animals not serviceable to him, the 

 break, the gap between man and his nearest mammalian relatives, 

 would be much greater still. However broad the gap was or might 

 become, its width could not affect the geological and biological fact 

 of man's having passed through an apelike phase in order to become 

 man ! Man's ruthless destruction of living things could only serve to 

 demonstrate more vividly his essentially brutal nature. 



Nor was Darwin perturbed by the absence of anthropoid and human 

 fossil remains connecting man with his apelike progenitors. First, 

 as he said, the discovery of fossils was a very slow and utterly fortui- 

 tous process; and second, the regions of the earth he thought most 

 likely to contain remains linking man with extinct apelike creatures 

 had not then even been searched. Livingstone had discovered the 

 Victoria Falls only four years before "The Origin of Species" was 

 published ! Not until 1870, the year before "The Descent of Man" 

 first appeared, did Schweinf urth succeed in reaching the area between 

 the Nile and the Congo watersheds and in finding that the central 

 African Pygmies really existed. So Darwin and his contemporaries 

 were ignorant of many of the facts that have assisted since his time 

 in vindicating his belief and confirming his optimism. 



Darwin and his scientific supporters were not perturbed about this 

 apparent gap between ape and man, but anthropologists have 

 struggled ever since to fill it in with fossils. Some enthusiasts have 

 even succeeded, at least temporarily, in thrusting a forgery like Pilt- 

 down man, the notorious Eoanthropus^ into the gap. Others, like 

 Eugene Dubois, have deliberately set out for the tropical regions 

 where the great apes live to search for an early ancestor of mankind, 

 a "missing link" such as Darwin's theory postulated. Dubois found 

 an ancestral type near the homeland of the orang-utan in Java in 

 1890-91, i. e.. Pithecanthropus, the Java ape-man. With equivalent 

 dedication Von Koenigswald also went to Java in 1927 and survived 

 imprisonment there during the second World War. He found two 

 different varieties of Pithecanthropus in Java! Davidson Black, 

 almost simultaneously, was recovering the closely related Sinanthro- 

 pus type from Choukoutien, not far from Pekin in China. In this 

 manner an earlier or pithecanthropine phase of human evolution pre- 

 ceding the neanderthaline phase was demonstrated to have been passed 

 through by man. 



