Section II, 1921 [47] Tr.\ns. R.S.C. 



The Phylogeny of Man From a New Angle 



By Charles Hill-Tout, F.R.S.C, F.R.A.I.; &c; &c. 



(Read May Meeting, 1921) 



Those who have followed the course of anthropological investi- 

 gation during the eight or nine years which have elapsed since the 

 discovery of the Piltdown remains will be aware that our views 

 respecting the antiquity and the progressive evolution of man have 

 undergone profound modification. Even before the discovery of 

 Eoanthropus there had been a growing feeling among anthropologists 

 that a new orientation of mind on these questions was becoming 

 increasingly necessary. 



The discovery at Combe Capelle, at Mentone and other places 

 of the remains of a race of men with distinctly modern characters 

 who were apparently living in Europe contemporaneously with the 

 markedly-primitive Neanderthal men brought considerable con- 

 fusion into our notions respecting the age of man and the course he 

 had followed in his physical development. 



Up to this time it had been very generally held and believed 

 that man in his upward course had passed through an orderly series 

 of evolutionary phases such as seemed to be indicated by the physical 

 characters of Pithecanthropus erectus, the Mauer jaw and Neander- 

 thal man, in which he had risen step by step from some primitive 

 creature not greatly unlike the anthropoids of to-day, to his present 

 human form; and that his past in his character of Homo sapiens, 

 did not extend very greatly beyond the middle of the Pleistocene 

 period. 



Following the views enunciated by Darwin in his "Descent of 

 Man" and their reinforcement by Huxley in his "Man's Place in 

 Nature" and the very general acceptance of the evolutionary theory, 

 it was scarcely possible to entertain any other opinion. And so, 

 when Dubois in 1891-2 discovered the remains of that singular crea- 

 ture he named Pithecanthropus erectus, which combined in itself 

 characters at once both human and simian, it was very naturally 

 hailed and regarded as the "missing link," the anticipated transi- 

 tional form connecting man with his hypothetical simian progenitors. 



And this view was further strengthened when a little later 

 other human remains of a type similar to the famous Neanderthal 

 man were unearthed in different localities in Europe, thus making 



