EXTINCT BABOONS. 143 



our knowledge of the geology of the greater part of that continent is of the most 

 limited nature. We must, indeed, with our present knowledge, travel to the 

 extreme north of India before we obtain evidence of fossil baboons belonging to a 

 period antecedent to that during which man has existed on the globe. And it is 

 in the sandstones forming the outer flanks of the mighty Himalaya to which 

 we have previously alluded as containing the remains of the extinct Indian 

 chimpanzee and orang, that those of the fossil baboons occur. These rocks, as we 

 have elsewhere stated, belong to the lower part of that division of the Tertiary 

 period which geologists designate the Pliocene. The remains of the Pliocene Indian 

 baboons are, like those of all the Primates, extremely few, yet they are amply 

 sufficient to prove the existence in that country of two distinct species. Both 

 of these appear to have been closely allied to some of the longer-tailed African 

 species : and we may therefore conclude that these Indian species were allied 

 to the sacred baboon or the chacma. There is, moreover, evidence that baboons 

 continued to exist in India to either the early human or Pleistocene period, since 

 a single tooth has been obtained from deposits in a cavern in Madras which has 

 likewise yielded remains of man. 



We have, therefore, decisive proof that at a former epoch of the earth's history 

 such an assembly of Primates was gathered together on the plains of India at a 

 time when the Himalaya did not exist, as has been seen nowhere else beyond the 

 walls of a menagerie. Side by side with langurs and macaques closely resembling 

 those now found in that region, were chimpanzees and baboons as nearly related to 

 those of modern Africa ; while the extinct Indian orang recalls the existing species of 

 Borneo and Sumatra. India, therefore, in the Pliocene period, seems to have been 

 the central point whence the main groups of Old World Primates dispersed them- 

 selves to their far distant homes. 



The generalised character, and the large size of the baboons, have suggested 

 that it is to them we should look as the original ancestral stock from which the 

 Man-like Apes took their rise. There is, however, found in the rocks of the 

 Miocene period (the one immediately antedating the Pliocene) of Europe, a baboon- 

 like ape known as the mountain ape (Oreoirithecus), which combines to a certain 

 extent the features now characteristic of the Man-like Apes and the baboons. It is 

 this creature, therefore, which we should rather be justified in regarding as the 

 ancestral stock of the Man-like Apes ; the baboons being survivors from a still 

 older stock, from which the mountain ape was itself derived. 



Whether the relationship which must once have existed between the baboons 

 and the inferior orders of Mammals will ever be revealed to us, is a question which 

 time alone can decide. 



