[hill-tout] PHYLOGENY OF MAN 71 



There are difficulties from whichever point of view we may 

 regard the question. But this much at least seems certain, that 

 whether we regard Eoanthropus as the direct ancestor of the thick- 

 skulled High-terrace men, and thus of modern man, or as a distinct 

 race apart which left no posterity, we have in seeking for man's 

 earliest progenitors to look for beings possessing cranial and facial 

 characters similar to those exhibited by him and not by beings like 

 Pithecanthropus. The fact that he possessed strongly-developed 

 canines and had no chin cannot be considered as wholly excluding him 

 from standing in the relation of direct ancestor to the men of the 

 100-foot terraces. A long interval intervenes between him and them, 

 and in that interval these characters might have become modified. 

 If man and the anthropoids had a common ancestor, as we believe, 

 then the earliest type of man must have possessed just such facial 

 and dental characters as we see in Eoanthropus because these are 

 characteristic of the whole sub-order of the Anthropoidea, and while 

 the anthropoid branch has retained them in an emphasised form 

 the human branch has lost them. The descendants of Eoanthropus 

 may, in course of time, have lost one of these characters and acquired 

 the other and thus might very well have become the direct ancestors 

 of the 100-foot terrace men. There is nothing antecedently im- 

 possible in the idea and two facts distinctly favor the notion. Both 

 types of humanity are found in the same region and both possess 

 the same marked thickness of skull, the only doubtful factor in the 

 case being whether the interval between the two periods is sufficient 

 to effect such radical differences. The more we learn of man's past 

 the clearer it becomes that radical changes in typical characters 

 require long ages to bring about. It may, therefore, be better to let 

 the question of the origin and affiliations of the pre-Mousterian men 

 stand in abeyance for the present and await further evidence of a 

 more determinative character. The discovery of Eoanthropus, 

 whatever his relations to the men who are seen to succeed him may 

 be, has had one good result at least — it has restored the 100-foot 

 terrace men to their rightful place in the scale of time. Their high 

 antiquity has been established and they are now seen in their true 

 perspective upon the background of human history. 



Regarding man's origin in the light thrown upon it by palaeonto- 

 logial evidence, that is, seeing him as we do the anthropoids, differ- 

 entiated into several distinct types, some relatively advanced and 

 some distinctly degenerate, in the Dawn-period of human history, 

 we ought not, in this review of man's past, to overlook entirely the 

 claims to antiquity made by Sergi for the Castenedolo remains. 



