MAN'S PEDIGREE 



Line of Descent Fairly Clear as Far Back as Eocene Epoch — Development of 

 Brain the Factor Which Separated Ancestors of Man from Other 

 Apes — Effects of Life in the Trees.' 



Dr. G. Elliot Smith, 

 Professor of Anatomy, University of Manchester, England. 



platyrrhine ape; the other, less modified, 

 descendants of which we recognize in 

 the South American monkeys of the 

 present day; and that the common an- 

 cestor of all these primates was a 

 lemuroid nearly akin to the curious 

 little spectral tarsier, which still haunts 

 the forests of Borneo, Java, and the 

 neighboring islands, and awakens in the 

 minds of the peoples of those lands a 

 superstitious dread — a sort of instinc- 

 tive horror at the sight of the ghost-like 

 representative of their first primate 

 ancestor. 



This much of man's pedigree will, I 

 think, be admitted by the great majority 

 of zoologists who are familiar with the 

 facts ; but I believe we can push the line 

 of ancestry still further back, beyond 

 the most primitive primate into Haeckel's 

 suborder Menotyphla, which most zool- 

 ogists regard as constituting two 

 families of insect ivora. I need not 

 stop to give the evidence for this 

 opinion, for most of the data and 

 arguments in support of it have recently 

 been simimarized most excellently by 

 Dr. W. K. Gregory." 



PRIMITIVE RELATIVES. 



This group includes the oriental tree 

 shrews and the African jirmping shrews. 

 The latter (Macroscelididae), living in 

 the original South African home of the 

 mammalia, present extraordinarily 

 primitive features linking them by close 

 bonds of affinity to the marsupials. 

 The tree shrews (Tupaiidae), however, 

 which range from India to Java, while 



' Portions of presidential address delivered before Anthropological Section of British Association 

 for the Advancement of Science at Dundee in September, 1912; printed in full in Nature, London, 

 Sept. 26, 1912. Dr. Smith is not responsible for the illustrations here used. 



2 "The Orders of Mammals," Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist., Vol. 27, 1910, p. 321. 



377 



NO ONE who is familiar with 

 the anatomy of man and the 

 apes can refuse to admit that 

 no hypothesis other than that 

 of close kinship affords a reasonable or 

 creditable explanation of the extra- 

 ordinarily exact identity of structure 

 that obtains in most parts of the bodies 

 of man and the gorilla. To deny the 

 validity of this evidence of near kinship 

 is tantamount to a confession of the 

 utter uselessness of the facts of com- 

 parative anatomy as indications of 

 genetic relationships, and a reversion to 

 the obscurantism of the dark ages of 

 biology. But if anyone still harbors an 

 honest doubt in the face of this over- 

 whelming testimony from mere struc- 

 ture, the reactions of the blood will 

 confirm the teaching of anatomy; and 

 the susceptibility of the anthropoid apes 

 to the infection of humati diseases, fromi 

 which other apes and mammals in 

 general are immune, should complete 

 and clinch the proof for all who are 

 willing to be convinced. 



Nor can anyone who, with an open 

 mind, applies similar tests to the gibbon 

 refuse to admit that it is a true, if very 

 primitive, anthropoid ape, nearly re- 

 lated to the common ancestor of man, 

 the gorilla, and the chimpanzee. More- 

 over, its structure reveals indubitable 

 evidence of its derivation from some 

 primitive Old World or catarrhine 

 monkey akin to the ancestor of the 

 langur, the sacred monkey of India. It 

 is equally certain that the catarrhine 

 apes were derived from some primitive 



