II50 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



Simian or Anthropoid apes on the other. In the same way we must 

 recognise that no living ape can be regarded as ancestral to man; 

 the conclusion being that a generalised anthropoid line, of which 

 we get some hint in the remains of the Miocene Pliopithecus 

 and Dry opith ecus, advanced to the great living apes, and the 

 Hominidae. 



(i) Unsatisfactory as yet is the vagueness of the early Hominoid 

 stem; for if the great dichotomy occurred in Oligocene or early 

 Miocene there is a long gap — of ignorance — ^between that and the 

 Upper Pliocene, or, more probably, the early Pleistocene, to which 

 the oldest actual relics of Hominidae are referred. These relics are 

 the much- discussed, tantalisingly fragmentary remains of Pithecan- 

 thropus erectus, found in 1891 near Trinil in Java. They included a 

 skull-cap, three teeth, and a thigh-bone, found scattered over about 

 twenty yards, but probably belonging to one person. The skull-cap 

 is somehat gibbon-like, indicating a brain in some respects sub- 

 human, especially in the cerebral region. The thigh-bone is modern- 

 ised, and essentially human; the teeth are distinctively human. 

 Sir Arthur Keith speaks of this shadowy being as "human in stature, 

 human in gait, human in all his parts, save his brain". But Boule — 

 while admitting that the skuU of Pithecanthropus "possesses 

 characters exactly intermediate between those of a large anthropoid 

 ape, like the chimpanzee, and of a primitive man" — is inclined to 

 regard the type as "a large specialised form which belongs to a twig 

 of the anthropoid branch independent of the true human branch". 

 The general opinion — among those who have a right to have one — 

 seems to be that the remains belonged to a creature intermediate 

 between Anthropoid apes and "man"; and it is encouraging to 

 recall the fact that the fossil bears a name which antedates its dis- 

 covery; for Haeckel made up the word Pithec-anthropos (ape-man) 

 to denote his then hypothetical intermediate type between apes 

 and men. Thus is Wisdom justified of her children! We must not 

 leave Pithecanthropus without noticing that his remains were 

 found along with those of over twenty other mammals — all extinct. 

 Their date could hardly be less than a quarter of a million years ago ; 

 and it is probable that the first emergence of Pithecanthropus was 

 long anterior to the time of the laying down of the diluvial deposits 

 in which the known fragments were found. 



(2) Probably not much later than Pithecanthropus arose the 

 Heidelberg man, represented by no more than a lower jaw! It is a 

 massive, chinless, ape-like jaw, till we look at the teeth, and find 

 them strangely human. The jaw was discovered by Schoetensack 

 in 1908, in river vaUey sands 79 feet below the surface, and after 

 about twenty years of searching; and in the same deposits were 

 remains of pre-glacial mammals, such as mammoth and woolly 

 rhinoceros. The date was probably First Interglacial, perhaps a 



