6 Dusois— On Pithecanthropus erectus : 
others to an Authropoid Ape, which, through the size of its skull, and some other 
characteristics, is the nearest to Man of all known, living and fossil, Anthropoids. 
The molar teeth are judged of in the same manner. The femur, however, is so 
human-like that nearly all, after reading my description and seeing the specimen 
itself, did not hesitate to declare it to be human. 
But up to the present moment no human remains have been found in the Lower 
Pleistocene; the oldest only reach down to about the middle of that period. 
From the Tertiary, however, every certain trace of the existence of Man is still 
missing. Moreover it is a fact that, with the exception of some isolated teeth, 
only three small specimens of remains of fossil Anthropoid Apes have been 
found. 
Considering, on the one side, this scarcity of remains of Anthropoids which all 
the researches in the whole world have brought to light up to the present moment, 
and on the other hand the complete absence of human remains from older strata than 
the Middle Pleistocene, it is certainly in the highest degree improbable that now, 
at once, should have been found the oldest human bone, which almost certainly 
goes back to the Tertiary period, and the largest fossil specimen yet known of an 
Anthropoid Ape, so paradoxically anthropoid that very experienced anatomists and 
zoologists have even taken it to be human. During five years’ researches in an 
area hundreds of square miles in extent, and particularly rich in remains of one 
fauna, I did not find (with perhaps a single exception) anything which could in the 
slightest degree suggest the idea of a great Anthropoid or of a Man. And yet, at 
Trinil, those skeleton remains, as already stated, were lying close together in 
exactly the same level of the self-same strata, which are more than 350 metres 
thick, and include a homogeneous fauna. Let us imagine the proportion on a 
smaller scale: we have a layer of 1 millimetre (representing the thickness of the 
bones) in a strata-complex 31 metres thick, and having an extent of some thousand 
square metres, and therein the four anthropoid remains (the like of which were 
never found elsewhere) at a distance of almost 15 centimetres, the one from the 
other. Certainly the probability that these remains, being exactly contemporary, 
are from the same skeleton is—unless the result of the anatomical examination 
should be decidedly contradictory—many thousand times greater than the reverse, 
viz. that the bones were never parts of the same animal. 
Now, however, the ¢ofal result of anatomical considerations which have been 
taken by zoologists and anatomists respecting these remains is in no way in 
decisive contradiction to their belonging together. Some, as Professor Cunningham,* 
* PD. J. Cunningham, ‘ Proceed. Anatom. Soc. of Great Britain and Ireland,” February 13th, 1895, 
p. xviii, ‘‘ Journal of Anatomy and Physiology,” vol. xxix., and ‘ Nature,” February 28th, 1895, vol. li., 
p: 429. 
