II56 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



Homo; but even among his different species there was the Uke 

 variation and sifting; for several, Uke the Neanderthal men, who 

 shared in the struggle, failed to enter into the promises. Our general 

 impression of this long and still very imperfect history must thus 

 not be crudely simplified, as of "man sprung from a monkey", but 

 rather of man as the outcome of ages of travail, of tentatives and 

 their testings. Can we wonder that the philosophically minded not 

 only see man in the light of evolution, but are inclined to view 

 Organic Evolution in the light of Man. 



WHERE MAN EMERGED. — This is not as yet a very pressing 

 question, for many more data must be accumulated before any 

 secure answer is possible. It is interesting, however, to notice that 

 Prof. W. K. Gregory, a leading American anthropologist, decides 

 in favour of Asia as man's place of origin. His statement of the case 

 confirms the prediction made in 1900 by Prof. Osborn, the distin- 

 guished palaeontologist of the New York Museum, that Northern 

 Asia would turn out to be the palaeontological Garden of Eden; 

 for this has been strikingly substantiated by the main discoveries 

 of the subsequent generation. For though Europe can show an early 

 approximation to a Hominid in the Pliocene Primate Dryopithectts 

 rhenanus, and such eloquently primitive Hominid remains as those 

 of Piltdown and Heidelberg, and though the Lower Oligocene of 

 Egypt has also its representatives of the man-anthropoid series, 

 there seems yet more to be said for locating Eden in Central Asia. 

 Perhaps Pithecanthropus in Java and the owners of the Wadjak 

 and Australian skulls were peripheral offshoots from the Asiatic 

 centre ; and the Nebraskan tooth may also represent such a migrant 

 from Central Asia. Speaking of teeth, we must allow some import- 

 ance to the 1 92 1 discovery of two human teeth in a cave at Chou 

 Kou Tien, south-west of Pekin, for the age indicated is Upper 

 Pliocene or Lower Pleistocene. Thus geological, palaeontological, 

 and anthropological arguments support the conclusion that man 

 emerged in Central Asia, which was probably in process of gradual 

 uplift at the time. Man represents such a new departure that the 

 hypothesis of several Edens for his emergence seems very unlikely. 



FACTORS IN MAN'S EVOLUTION. -The stock from which 

 Hominids diverged was doubtless for a long time arboreal, and this 

 apprenticeship had many consequences, well worked out by R. 

 Anthony and by F. Wood Jones. The hand was emancipated from 

 being an organ of support, and remained generalised, fit for any- 

 thing, yet for grasping especially. Through the evolution of a free 

 hand, able to lift the food to the mouth, it became possible to 

 dispense with protrusive lips and gripping teeth. Thus the snout 

 region began to recede, and there was a correlated increase of the 



