I56 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



The discoveries made at Fayoum in Egypt in 1910 and studied 

 by Schlosser, show that in the course of the Oligocene these lower 

 types of Primates gave rise to forms which have been regarded in 

 part as the ancestors of the Catarhine apes and, in part, of the 

 anthropoids. In fact, it is at about this epoch that the differentia- 

 tion took place, for on leaving the Miocene all the remains of apes 

 discovered present very close affinities with the living species. 

 I may cite for the Miocene epoch the Pliopithecus anti- 

 q u u s , a close ally of the gibbons, the Mesopithecus 

 p e n t e 1 i c i , intermediate between the macaque and the Sem- 

 nopithecus, and for the Plio-Miocene epoch the Cyno- 

 cephalus subhimalayanus, which is a true baboon ; the 

 Palaeopithecus sivalensis, which presents the char- 

 acters both of the orang and of the chimpanzee ; the Siva- 

 pithecus indicus which has certain affinities with the 

 gorilla. In the Pliocene, and much more emphatically during the 

 Pleistocene, the identity of the fossil with the living species must be 

 regarded as probable. 



It is then evident that the human phylum and the simian phylum 

 have developed in parallel lines, each dividing and subdividing ever 

 since time of extremely ancient date, and without paradox one may 

 say that if Homo neanderthalensis had had, like our- 

 selves, a curiosity in regard to his origin, the problem he set before 

 himself would be almost in the same terms as that which presents 

 itself to us. That at a geological epoch still more remote, so far 

 back that our present knowledge will not permit us to fix it with 

 precision, these two phyla were but one, losing themselves then 

 in a common ancestor, we can not doubt. That paleontology will 

 bring us some day documents which will permit us to establish the 

 complete chain of this double genealogy, human and simian, the 

 capital discoveries of the last years permit us to hope. One must 

 give credit to the science which has already resolved so many secrets 

 of dead nature, and we may affirm now that when this work is 

 complete, man and the ape will appear as the ultimate forms of 

 lines which have evolved independently for so long a time that 

 there has never been any veritable parent of both. 



Karl Vogt said he would rather be a perfected ape than a fallen 

 angel. We do not have to choose between these alternatives. 

 We know that man is neither one nor the other. 



