THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



those animals at the time wherv the eruption of 

 that volcano occurred. 



This creature must have had a strange likeness 

 to human beings. It had almost the height of 

 a man. Its upper thigh indicates that it had 

 the habit of walking upright. Indeed, it was so 

 manlike that a number of authorities in anatomy, 

 for instance Rudolph Virchow, declared without 

 hesitation that it was a genuine human bone. 

 But matters were different with the skull. Flat, 

 without a forehead, and with bumps above his 

 eyes, this skull seemed in its fundamental plan to 

 be an extreme exaggeration of the Neander Val- 

 ley skull. But this exaggeration went so far 

 that the human likeness receded against a new 

 likeness. This Trinil skull resembled strikingly 

 a monkey skull. And it was -even possible to 

 name the definite species of monkey which it 

 resembled most nearly, a monkey living to this 

 day in Southern Asia, the so-called gibbon. The 

 gibbon is the nearest relative of the ourang- 

 outang, the gorilla and the chimpanzee. The 

 present living species are all of them much smal- 

 ler than this strange creature of Trinil was. But 

 that old skull was, in many respects, so like that 

 of the gibbon that quite a number of grave ex- 

 perts declared that it belonged to an extinct 

 species of gibbon which had the size of a man. 



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