IN BORNEAN FORESTS [chap. 



The discovery in Java of the fossil remains of an anthropoid 

 nearer to Man than any of those now living might suggest that 

 island as one of the localities where anthropoids have become 

 humanized ; but I hold many deductions concerning the fauna 

 and flora of a country in past geological epochs which are based on 

 the fossil remains found in its strata to be completely erroneous 

 because the locality where the fossil remains of a plant or of an 

 animal are found is, in most cases, not that in which one or the other 

 formerly lived, but merely the place where their remains were 

 eventually deposited, which may often be far distant from the 

 locality whence they originally came. Thus, that fossil remains of 

 Pithecanthropus were found in Java certainly does not prove, accord- 

 ing to my views, that that creature lived on the island ; but 

 merely shows that its remains were deposited where Java now is, 

 when that island, during the volcanic disturbances it has experi- 

 enced, emerged from the sea with its high mountains, and doubt- 

 less caused other lands in the adjacent seas to be submerged. My 

 objection to admitting that Java and Borneo may have been centres 

 of humanization rests principally on the difficulties above men- 

 tioned, that an exclusively forestal region must necessarily have 

 been ill-suited to an anthropoid's assuming a bipedal means of pro- 

 gression. Considering that tropical Africa produced those big 

 anthropoids which in the structure of their limbs and better adap- 

 tation to terrestrial locomotion approach nearest to the human 

 type, considering again that on that continent were evolved the 

 greater number of mammals provided with rapid means of terres- 

 trial locomotion, I am of opinion that tropical Africa — or, rather, 

 perhaps, a land of similar climatic conditions interposed between 

 the African and the Asiatic continents, a land whose existence 

 can alone explain facts otherwise unexplainable in the geogra- 

 phical distribution of plants and animals — must have been the 

 region where Man assumed his erect gait and bipedal progression. 



Even the colour of the skin may furnish arguments in favour of 

 the hypothesis that Africa, or an ancient dependency of that con- 

 tinent, may have been the region where anthropomorphs were 

 transformed into man-like creatures ; for Africa is the land where 

 mammals with black skins poorly provided with hair are most 

 frequent, and it may be surmised that the first men were black, 

 because they evolved from anthropomorphs of that colour. The 

 black colour of African Man and his predecessors may be sup- 

 posed to have been produced during the epoch of morphological 

 malleability by the combined action of the light and heat in the 

 climate of tropical Africa, although at the present time climate 

 hardly has any effect towards changing the colour of the complexion. 

 Again, it may be conjectured that the white complexion may have 

 been acquired by Man in a period when the environment still exerted 



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