Smith: Man's Pedigree 



383 



FOURTH STAGE OF THE HISTORY. 



The spectral tarsier {Tarsius borneanus),a. lemur or lemuroid f rom Borneo which Dr. Smith con- 

 siders to be the most primitive of the primates. Its ancestors, probably not much diflferent 

 from the tarsier of the present day, are then to be considered the ancestors of all the 

 primates including man. The progress of the tarsioid toward domination of the world is 

 due, the writer thinks, to the development of the prefrontal area of the brain, which gave 

 it the power to profit by experience. (Fig. 3.) 



plasticity and power of further de- 

 velopment. 



Having now examined the nature of 

 the factors that have made a primate 

 from an insectivore and have trans- 

 formed a tarsioid prosimian into an ape, 

 let us turn next to consider how man 

 himself was fashioned. 



THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 



In the remote Oligocene, a catarrhinc 

 ape, nearly akin to the ancestors of the 

 Indian sacred monkey, Semnopithecus, 



became definitely specialized in struc- 

 ture in adaptation for the assumption of 

 the erect attitude ; and this type of early 

 anthropoid has persisted with relatively 

 slight modifications in the gibbon of the 

 present day. But if the earliest gibbons 

 were already able to walk upright, how 

 is it, one might ask, that they did not 

 begin to use their hands, thus freed from 

 the work of progression on the earth, 

 for skilled work, and at once become 

 men? The obvious reason is that the 

 brain had not yet attained a sufficiently 

 high stage of development to provide a 

 sufficient amount of useful skilled work, 



