EXTINCT BABOONS. 
T 43 
our knowledge of the geology of the greater part of that continent is of the most 
limited nature. We must, indeed, with our present knowledge, travel to the 
extreme north of India before we obtain evidence of fossil baboons belonging to a 
period antecedent to that during which man has existed on the globe. And it is 
in the sandstones forming the outer flanks of the mighty Himalaya to which 
we have previously alluded as containing the remains of the extinct Indian 
chimpanzee and orang, that those of the fossil baboons occur. These rocks, as we 
have elsewhere stated, belong to the lower part of that division of the Tertiary 
period which geologists designate the Pliocene. The remains of the Pliocene Indian 
baboons are, like those of all the Primates, extremely few, yet they are amply 
sufficient to prove the existence in that country of two distinct species. Both 
of these appear to have been closely allied to some of the longer-tailed African 
species; and we may therefore conclude that these Indian species were allied 
to the sacred baboon or the chacma. There is, moreover, evidence that baboons 
continued to exist in India to either the early human or Pleistocene period, since 
a single tooth has been obtained from deposits in a cavern in Madras which has 
likewise yielded remains of man. 
' We have, therefore, decisive proof that at a former epoch of the earth’s history 
such an assembly of Primates was gathered together on the plains of India at a 
time when the Himalaya did not exist, as has been seen nowhere else beyond the 
walls of a menagerie. Side by side with langurs and macaques closely resembling 
those now found in that region, were chimpanzees and baboons as nearly related to 
those of modern Africa; while the extinct Indian orang recalls the existing species of 
Borneo and Sumatra. India, therefore, in the Pliocene period, seems to have been 
the central point whence the main groups of Old World Primates dispersed them¬ 
selves to their far distant homes. . 
The generalised character, and the large size of the baboons, have suggested 
that it is to them we should look as the original ancestral stock from which the 
Man-like Apes took their rise. There is, however, found in the rocks of the 
Miocene period (the one immediately antedating the Pliocene) of Europe, a baboon¬ 
like ape known as the mountain ape ( Oreopithecu-s ), which combines to a certain 
extent the features now characteristic of the Man-like Apes and the baboons. It is 
this creature, therefore, which we should rather be justified in regarding as the 
ancestral stock of the Man-like Apes; the baboons being survivors from a still 
older stock, from which the mountain ape was itself derived. 
Whether the relationship which must once have existed between the baboons 
and the inferior orders of Mammals will ever be revealed to us, is a question which 
time alone can decide. 
