
4 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN 
middle of this century man will be 
alone amid the ruins of the mammalian 
world he has destroyed, the period’ of 
the Age of Mammals will have entirely 
closed, and the Age of Man will have 
reached a numerical climax, from which 
some statisticians believe it will prob- 
ably recede, because we are approach- 
ing the point of the overpopulation of 
the earth in three of the five great 
continents. 
The Ascent of Man 
The cradle of the human race was, 
in our opinion, in Asia, in regions not 
yet explored by paleontologists. One 
reason that human and prehuman fossil 
remains are rare is that the ancestors 
of man lived partly among the trees 
and forests; this does not mean that 
they were arboreal; they lived chiefly 
on the ground. Even when living in a 
more open country the ancestors of 
man were alert to escape the floods and 
sandstorms which entombed animals 
like the horse of the open country and 
of the plains. Hence fossil remains of 
man as well as of his ancestors are ex- 
tremely rare until the period of burial 
began. Only two races, the Heidelberg 
and the Piltdown, are certainly known 
from the river drifts and gravels before 
the period of burials. 
The human remains known consist 
principally of portions of skulls, of 
jaws, and teeth of members of these 
races. Individuals are now represented 
by casts in the hall of the Age of Man. 
The museum series began in 1915 with 
the gift of the J. Leon Williams Collec- 
tion, and has been enriched by addi- 
tions from the museums of London, 
Paris, and recently of the Neanderthal 
man of Krapina, presented by Profes- 
sor K. Gorjanovic-Kramberger, also 
the Talgai skull from South Australia, 
presented by Dr. Stewart A. Smith. 
Man as a Primate 
The ascent of man as one of the 
Primates was parallel with that of the 
9 
families of apes. Man has a lony line 
of ancestry of his own, perhaps two 
million or more years in length. He 
is not descended from any known form 
of ape either living or fossil. One 
hypothetical ancestral stage, of which 
we have a small jaw (see middle bot- 
tom of exhibit in Case I, opposite 
page) found in the Oligocene of north- 
ern Egypt, is the Propliopithecus, 
which in the opinion of Professor W. 
K. Gregory, of the American Museum, 
our leading authority on the anthro- 
poids, is at least structurally ancestral 
to the higher apes and man—in other 
words a possible prehuman link. From 
such an animal possibly four branches 
were given off leading respectively to 
the living orangs, the gibbons, the 
chimpanzees, the gorillas, and some of 
their fossil ancestors. 
All these great man apes are dis- 
tinguished from man by being more or 
less arboreal in habit; they are shown 
to be very far removed from the large- 
brained walking line which gave rise to 
our ancestors. Our own immediate an- 
cestors did not live in trees; they were 
erect or semi-erect for a very long 
period, perhaps as far back as Miocene 
time. Back of this, perhaps a million 
years ago, was a prehuman, arboreal 
stage. 
The Trinil ape-man, the Pithecan- 
thropus of Java (see center of Case 
I) is the first of the conundrums in 
human ancestry. Is the Trinil race 
prehuman or not? The restored head 
by Professor J. Howard McGregor, of 
Columbia University, is designed to 
show its half human, half anthropoid 
resemblance, as suggested by the top of 
the cranium, the only part known. 
which is far more human than that 
of any ape cranium, and at the same 
time far more apelike than that of any 
human cranium. It is not impossible 
that this ape-man is related to the 
Neanderthal man (skull shown in Case 
3 
In this exhibit of the great man apes _ 

