VERTEBRATE ANCESTORS OF MAN ? 65 



Of all still living apes, the nearest to man are 

 the great tail-less thin-nosed apes, the Orang and 

 Gibbon of Asia, and the Gorilla and Chimpanzee 

 of Africa. These anthropoid apes probably origi- 

 nated in the Miocsene period of the Tertiary time, 

 as did the unknown direct ancestors of man now- 

 extinct. 



Although the preceding man-like apes already 

 stood so near to man proper that the admission of a 

 transition stage is scarcely needed to complete the 

 line, we may, nevertheless, Haeckel says, consider as 

 such, speechless Ape-men. These ' fathers of 

 man ' probably lived towards the end of the tertiary 

 time and were evolved from man-like apes by com- 

 plete habituation to the upright posture, and the 

 correspondingly greater differentiation of the pectoral 

 from the pelvic extremities, the anterior hand be- 

 coming in them the human hand, and the posterior 

 hand a walking foot. 



True men were evolved from Ape-men of the 

 preceding stage by the gradual development of their 

 vocal sounds into connected and articulate speech. 

 The acquisition of this faculty being naturally 

 accompanied hand in hand by the development of 

 other organs, and by the higher ' differentiation ' of 

 the larynx and of the brain. 



This transition from speechless ape-men to the 

 true or speaking men first took place, probably, in the 

 beginning of the quaternary, or, as Haeckel proposes 

 to call it, the Anthropolithic time, that is the glacial 



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