5o6 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN 
We now come to the position which must be assigned 
to the humanoid form found in Java by Professor Dubois. 
The thigh bone was shaped as in man, and we presume 
Pithecanthropus had a body fashioned much like that of 
modern man. In size of brain and shape of slcull, how- 
ever, this strange form occupies an intermediate position. 
The stratum in which the remains were found is assigned 
to a late Pliocene or early Pleistocene date. Clearly, 
Pithecanthropus represents an early stage in the evolu- 
tion of the human phylum. The evidence already 
adduced indicates that certain forms of early man had 
already attained a high development in the Pliocene 
period. Therefore in fig. 187 the stem represented by 
Pithecanthropus is shown as separating from the ancestral 
phylum of man at a late part of the Miocene period. 
We can only explain the existence of so primitive a form of 
human being at the end of the Pliocene period by adopting 
a hypothesis of this kind. 
It is only when we come to draft a genealogical tree, 
such as that shown in fig. 187, that we realise the true 
significance of those extinct human types. When we 
look at the world of men as it exists now, we see 
that certain races are becoming dominant ; others are 
disappearing. The competition is world-wide and lies 
between varieties of the same species of man. In the 
world of fossil man the competition was different ; it 
was local, not universal ; it lay between human beings 
belonging to different species or genera, not varieties of 
the same species. Out of that welter of fossil forms 
only one type has survived — that which gives us the 
modern races of man. Further, we realise that the three 
or four human types so far discovered represent but a 
few fossil twigs of the great evolutionary human tree. 
We may hope to find many more branches. 
There is another route by which we may approach the 
problem of man's antiquity. All who have made a study 
of the human body are agreed that we must seek for 
man's origin in an ape-like ancestor. If, therefore, we 
review the facts which bear on the evolution of the 
