XV DARWINISM APPLIED TO MAN 459 



we consider that, even in our own day, men are not unfre- 

 quently overwhelmed by volcanic eruptions, as in Java and 

 Japan, or carried away in vast numbers by floods, as in Bengal 

 and China, it seems impossible but that ample remains of 

 Miocene and Pliocene man do exist buried in the most recent 

 layers of the earth's crust, and that more extended research 

 or some fortunate discovery Avill some day bring them to 

 light. 



The Probable Birthplace of Man. 



It has usually been considered that the ancestral form of 

 man originated in the tropics, where vegetation is most 

 abundant and the climate most equable. But there are some 

 important objections to this view. The anthropoid apes, as 

 well as most of the monkey tribe, are essentially arboreal in 

 their structure, whereas the great distinctive character of man 

 is his special adaptation to terrestrial locomotion. We can 

 hardly suppose, therefore, that he originated in a forest region, 

 Avhere fruits to be obtained by climbing are the chief vegetable 

 food. It is more probable that he began his existence on the 

 open plains or high plateaux of the temperate or sub-tropical 

 zone, where the seeds of indigenous cereals and numerous 

 herbivora, rodents, and game-birds, Avith fishes and molluscs in 

 the lakes, rivers, and seas supplied him with an abundance of 

 varied food. In such a region he would develop skill as a 

 hunter, trapper, or fisherman, and later as a herdsman and 

 cultivator, — a succession of which Ave find indications in the 

 j^alseolithic and neolithic races of Europe. 



In seeking to determine the particular areas in Avhich his 

 earliest traces are likely to be found, Ave are restricted to 

 some portion of the Eastern hemisphere, where alone the 

 anthropoid apes exist, or have apparently ever existed. 



There is good reason to believe, also, that Africa must be 

 excluded, because it is knoAvn to have been separated from 

 the northern continent in early tertiary times, and to have 

 acquired its existing fauna of the higher mammalia by a 

 later union Avith that continent after the separation from it of 

 Madagascar, an island which has preserved for us a sample, as 

 it Avere, of the early African mammalian fauna, from Avhich 

 not only the anthropoid apes, but all the higher quadrumana 



