MAN FROM THE FARTHEST PAST 
haps not even chiefly, on the ground. The erect type was not per- 
fectly developed. 
The characteristics of the hip joint and also the knee 
joint “render it probable that Pithecanthropus was less 
ground-walker than tree-climber, but did not climb with 
a prehensile foot, in the way of Apes. . . . The femur of 
Pithecanthropus was, therefore, also fit for locomotion on 
the ground, but by no means adapted so exclusively for 
it as in Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis.” 
(Plate 48.) 
Doctor Hrdli¢ka finally concludes: 
But all this is not the pivotal essential of the find, and 
diminishes in no wise its high interest and value, both of 
which are universally acknowledged, particularly since the 
endocranial cast has become available. Neither should 
the student allow himself to be confused by the seeming 
flood of discrepancies of opinion on the remains. The 
differences are often more apparent than real, and even 
where real they by no means discredit the find, but are 
only so many trials, under all the great limitations of our 
present collections and knowledge, to reach a true con- 
clusion. 
The Trinil skull alone is sufficient to establish the pres- 
ence in what is now Java, somewhere during the early 
Quaternary and possibly earlier, of a class of beings that 
so resembled the anthropoid apes, on the one hand, and 
came so far in the direction of man, on the other, that if it 
was to be named today we could hardly find a more ap- 
propriate name for it than Pithecanthropus. 
It really is of little moment whether one student calls 
these beings giant gibbons, another, human precursors or 
intermediary forms, and a third, proto-homo or even a very 
low man; unless one is led astray from the truth by a lack 
of sufficient contact with the remains, they all mean a 
form somewhere between the status of all the known apes 
and of all except perhaps the earliest man. Who can say 
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