456 DARWINISM 



CHAP. 



liad diverged from each other. Now, this divergence almost 

 certainly took place as early as the Miocene jicriod, because in 

 the Upper Miocene deposits of Western Eiu'ope remains of two 

 species of ape have been found allied to the gibbons, one of 

 them, Dryopithecus, nearly as large as a man, and believed by 

 M. Lartet to have approached man in its dentition more than 

 the existing apes. We seem hardly, therefore, to have reached, 

 in the Upper Miocene, the epoch of the common ancestor of 

 man and the anthropoids. 



The evidence of the antiquity of man himself is also scantj-, 

 and takes us but very little Avay back into the past. We 

 have clear proof of his existence in Eiu'ope in the latter stages 

 of the glacial epoch, \nih many indications of his presence in 

 interglacial or even pre-glacial times ; while both the actual 

 remains and the works of man found in the aiu'iferous travels 

 of California deep under lava-flows of Pliocene age, show that 

 he existed in the New World at least as early as in the 

 Old.i These earliest remains of man have been received 

 with doubt, and even Avith ridicule, as if there were some 

 extreme improbability in them. But, in point of fact, 

 the wonder is that human remains have not been found 

 more frequently in pre-glacial deposits. Eef erring to the 

 most ancient fossil remains found in Europe — the Engis 

 and Neanderthal crania, — Professor Huxley makes the follow- 

 ing weighty remark : "In conclusion, I may say, that the 

 fossil remains of Man hitherto discovered do not seem to me 

 to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by 

 the modification of which he has, probably, become Avhat he 

 is. " The Calif ornian remains and works of art, above referred 

 to, give no indication of a specially low form of man ; and it 

 remains an imsolved problem why no traces of the long line 

 of man's ancestors, back to the remote period when he first 

 branched off" from the pithecoid type, have yet been discovered. 



It has been objected by some WTiters — notably by Professor 

 Boyd Dawkins — that man did not probably exist in Pliocene 

 times, because almost all the knovm mammalia of that epoch 

 are distinct sj^ecies from those now li\dng on the earth, 

 and that the same changes of the environment which led to 



^ For a sketch of the evidence of Man's Antiquity in America, see The 

 Nineteenth Century for November 1887. 



