38 "THE COMING OF MAN 



teeth adapted to a browsing or a grazing diet. They have 

 lengthened their legs and become swift and wary. Every 

 one of these and other orders adapted itself to its own place, 

 food and conditions, and met and solved the problem of the 

 struggle for existence in its own way. 



The primates, including monkeys and apes as well as man, 

 are represented in Eocene deposits by forms akin to the 

 lemurs or '' half-apes " whose center and chief home is now 

 in Madagascar. They may have originated in the north- 

 western part of North America. From this region one branch 

 went southward and gave rise to the South American mon- 

 keys with prehensile tails and a rather poorly developed 

 hand. A second branch migrated into Asia, and from these 

 the catarrhini or old-world apes are descended. At the head 

 of the apes stand the anthropoids: the gibbon, the orang, the 

 chimpanzee and the gorilla. Every one of them approaches or 

 resembles man in some respect more closely than does any other 

 of them, and every one differs from him in certain important 

 characteristics. 



The most important and influential characteristics of all 

 the anthropoids is their arboreal character. The squirrel runs 

 up the trunk of a tree or along its branches holding by its 

 claws. The primates are larger forms. They stand on one 

 branch and grasp another above them with their hands. They 

 are genuine climbers, differentiating hand and arm sharply 

 from foot and leg. They have not closely adapted their teeth 

 to any one kind of food as nearly all other groups of mam- 

 m.als have done, but are practically omnivorous. This char- 

 acteristic was a great advantage to their descendant man, 

 to whom almost any kind of food was welcome. 



We can hardly imagine a better school for the training 

 of our primate ancestor than arboreal life. He had to train 

 arm and hand to a great variety of very different and pre- 

 cise movements. Wallace tells us that the orang in the tropi- 

 cal forest can swing himself from branch to branch and tree 

 to tree as fast as the hunter can follow it on the ground below. 

 This is the best training possible at this stage for the de- 



