REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I913 I55 



divergent branch and terminal from the trunk of which have issued 

 the great anthropomorphic apes. 



In resume, the incontestable advances of paleontology have every- 

 where served to clear up these later discoveries. They have given 

 precision to the problem of the origin of man, although without 

 bringing any definite and final solution. Recent discoveries have 

 established the fact that there developed in Europe during the 

 Lower Quaternary, a human type absolutely different from the 

 modern type, having certain pithecoid characters more marked 

 than the lowest contemporaneous races, but nevertheless un- 

 questionably meriting the name of man. The interpretation of 

 these discoveries leads us to suppose that at the same time with 

 this inferior creature there probably existed another human type 

 (of which the Piltdown skull is perhaps the first evidence as yet 

 known), the evolution of which comes out in the human races of 

 the Later Quaternary, and consequently in the living races. But 

 nowhere in Europe, so far as we have gone back into the past, 

 have we yet found an anthropoid form from which might have 

 issued the various types of the genus Homo. 



Man has then behind him a long series of ancestors of human 

 form of which we have as yet recognized only a few. 



All that we know today of the history of the fossil apes proves 

 that, as in the human branch, the simian branch plunges back into 

 the depths of the past, with no present fact known that permits us 

 to fix upon the epoch at which these two branches united into one 

 common trunk. 



The most ancient Primates known appeared in the Lower Eocene, 

 near the opening of the Tertiary era, in North America, as creatures 

 of a generalized type, on account of which it is very difficult to 

 distinguish them from certain contemporary animals which it is 

 necessary to place at the origin of other orders, such, for example, 

 as the Insectivores. The most differentiated among them may be 

 related to the living Lemurs. These Primates living primitively 

 on the North American continent or in a boreal American-European 

 continent, probably emigrated in part toward South America where 

 they gave origin to the Platyrhine apes, partly toward Europe 

 where they are known to have appeared during the Middle Eocene 

 and to have multiplied in the Upper Eocene and Lower Oligocene, 

 afterward passing into Asia, then into Africa, and finally to Mada- 

 gascar where they have given birth to the various species of Lemurs 

 in this island. 



