io8 THE ORIGIN OF MAN 



fess that I think this caution is overdone. It is a 

 concession to the spiritual police. If we had the re- 

 mains of man's ancestors before us, they would almost 

 certainly be classed as those of monkeys in the earlier 

 stage and apes in the later. Possibly some of them 

 are actually among the existing fossils. 



On this point, however, there is some dispute among 

 men of science. There are those, possibly the ma- 

 jority, who would look for man's last pre-human 

 ancestor in some branch of the family of large man- 

 like apes which spread over the region of the Mediter- 

 ranean between a half-million and a million years 

 ago (to use a common scale). Certain branches of 

 this family became the gibbons, gorillas, orangs, and 

 chimpanzees. Other branches died out. One branch 

 became the human race. 



Other scientific men would place the departure from 

 the ape-world much further back. Professor Keith 

 one of the most recent authorities, thinks that the 

 branch of the arboreal animals which was to become 

 man separated from the main stem before the man- 

 like apes were developed. He looks for a common 

 ancestor of the primitive htunans and the primitive 

 apes something like two million years ago.^ This 

 common ancestor was, however, of a monkey-type, 

 a branch of the very large simian world of the time. 

 But a more recent writer has maintained that the 



^ See the excellent genealogical trees in his A ntiguity oj Man 

 (I9I5)»PP- 508 and 509. 



