Lemurs, Monkeys, and Apes 
7 
It may also be added that the existing apes have relatively large 
and powerful fore limbs or arms; but it is unlikely that the 
common ancestors of apes and man, when discovered, will show 
this preponderance of the fore quarters. 
Pithecanthropus erectus. 
The man-like apes seem to have disappeared from Europe 
early in Pliocene times, when the climate of this region began to 
assume a temperate character, and eventually passed through the 
glacial period. It is therefore necessary to search the geological 
formations of more tropical lands for the essential links between 
the ancestral apes and man. It seems unlikely that any of these 
animals would return to colder climes until they had acquired the 
faculty and habit of combating nature by the artificial means of 
clothing and fire — in fact, until they had actually become man. 
Unfortunately, only one discovery which may perhaps be 
regarded as tending to fill the gap between the ancestral apes and 
man, has hitherto been made in the tropics ; and the remains in 
this case are so fragmentary that they admit of more than one 
interpretation. They comprise the roof of a skull, two molar 
teeth, and a thigh-bone found by Professor E. Dubois in a river- 
deposit of either late Pliocene or early Pleistocene age at Trinil, 
in Java. They probably belong to a single individual, though this 
is uncertain, and they are considered by Dubois to represent a 
link between the gibbons and man, which he names Pithecan- 
thropus erectus. 
The roof of the skull is remarkably like that of the gibbons, 
which still live in Java, with a low crown and prominent brow- 
ridges ; but it is relatively large, approaching the skull of a small 
man in size, with a brain-capacity apparently almost within the 
human limit, and some peculiarities which seem to be distinctly 
human. The two molar teeth, on the other hand, are more nearly 
like those of a gibbon than of a man. The thigh-bone implies an 
upright gait, but it is not completely human, the lower end 
especially being reminiscent of the gibbon. Pithecanthropus may, 
indeed, be an ancestral man, or it may be merely a gigantic and 
precocious gibbon. Like the extinct lemurs of Madagascar, some 
of the gibbons of Java may have been relatively gigantic just 
before the appearance of man. 
Plaster casts of the roof of the skull and the two molar teeth 
of Pithecanthropus are exhibited in Table -case 1. 
