494 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1913. 



were unable to revert wholly to the latter. On the whole, they kept, 

 probably irregularly, progressing toward man, and when eventually 

 a part of them varied so far in the direction of the human being 

 that a complete return even to their own former kind became im- 

 possible, then, it may be conceived, the earliest representatives of 

 man were established. These earliest men doubtless from the be- 

 ginning lacked in uniformity; some strains of them, in all likeli- 

 hood, lacked also in vitality or in sufficient adaptability to changing 

 conditions and have disappeared; but others kept on modifying in 

 the upward dii'ection until in the course of long ages they reached 

 the various somewhat imequally advanced types of man of the 

 present day. 



The above deductions concerning man's origin seem to be justified 

 from the study of the material now at the disposal of the anthropolo- 

 gist. The whole process of man's rise, viewed comprehensively, 

 appears as a most remarkable, multiple, progressive, sustained, pos- 

 sibly more or less irregular, and not yet finished differentiation, the 

 exact and enduring causes of which are not well understood. The 

 various actual species of primates lower than man may in a sense be 

 viewed as by-products of his own evolution, partly perhaps as his 

 distant cousins, descendants from some of the old primate stocks, 

 or as the retarded and aberrant relatives, unable or not called upon 

 by their environment to keep up with his progress, and slowly modi- 

 fying more or less sui generis. The old mono- and polygenistic 

 theories dissolve, of course, equally before these closer assumptions. 



The final stages of the progression toward the human form, ac- 

 cording to such light on the subject as we now have, began toward 

 the close of the Tertiary period. By the end of the Tertiary it seems 

 probable that there already existed some of the transitional forms, 

 the predecessors of the human being, approaching present man in size 

 of skull and brain, in the character of the teeth, in stature, in the 

 form of the pelvis, and in other particulars. It is even possible that 

 before the close of this period man's precursors began the use of 

 articulate language, and thus passed the somewhat more definite 

 functional boundary separating these forerunners from man. But 

 the bulk of the life history of the human being proper belongs to the 

 Quaternary period, the period of repeated advances and retrogres- 

 sions of glacial climate over the North Temperate Zone. The oldest 

 known human remains have been found in deposits and with the 

 bones of extinct animals of glacial or interglacial times. As we 

 go backward into that period we find that the human forms and 

 in general also the products of human activities become more primi- 

 tive. On the other hand, after the last glacial recession, some eight 

 thousand or more years ago, man was already physically much like 

 he is to-day. 



