Part 4

“Thus comparative anatomy proves to the satisfaction of every unprejudiced and critical student the significant fact that the body of man and that of the anthropoid ape are not only peculiarly similar, but they are practically one and the same in every important respect. The same two hundred bones, in the same order and structure, make up our inner skeleton; the same three hundred muscles effect our movements; the same hair clothes our skin; the same groups of ganglionic cells build up the marvellous structure of our brain; the same four-chambered heart is the central pulsometer in our circulation; the same thirty-two teeth are set in the same order in our jaws; the same salivary, hepatic, and gastric glands compass our digestive process; the same reproductive organs insure the maintenance of our race.”

Like human beings, these apes stand from three to six feet tall; like human beings, they weigh from one hundred to three hundred pounds; like human beings, they have only a rudimentary tail of from three to five joints imbedded at the extremity of the spine; like human beings, they stand on their hind legs and grasp things with their hands; like human beings, they live in families; like human beings, they are brave, quarrelsome, impulsive, emotional, and capable of a limited exercise of reason.

In their native forests, apes laugh, sing, dance, and converse with one another. Their language is a series of sounds with definite meanings.

Yet it is not held that man has descended from any of these existing anthropoid apes. What is held is that these creatures and human beings represent two different lines of development from the same ancestors.

But what of the “missing link” between the early ape-like creatures and primitive man? In 1891, Dr. Eugene Dubois, a Dutch military physician, found near Trinil, in Java, some interesting bones and some teeth. The International Zoological Congress, held at Leyden in 1894, voted that these bones had belonged to a form intermediary between ape-like creatures and men. The creature was named the Pithecanthropus Erectus—the erect ape-man.

Fig. 30 (upper) shows a restoration of the skull of this ape-like human being, placed, to facilitate comparison, above the skull of a modern man. The formation of the skull of this creature represents a decided advance over any existing anthropoid ape; but the prominent supra-orbital ridges, the low, retreating forehead, and the massive, prognathous jaws, which gave a brutish angle to the face, are distinctly ape-like characteristics.

There are fifty known species of the lemur, of which thirty-six belong to Madagascar. The others are found in Africa and South-Eastern Asia. They were formerly much more widely distributed, and many fossil lemurs have been found in North America.]

The most interesting feature of this primitive creature’s approach to man was the volume of his brain. The quantity of the brain of the highest ape measures about 600 cubic centimetre units. In some Australian “black fellows” the brain capacity runs as low as 900 units, while in others it reaches 1500. The brains of civilized men vary in bulk from 1000 to 2000 units, which gives 1500 cubic centimetres as the brain capacity of the average man. Now the skull of the Pithecanthropus Erectus shows that his brain measured nearly a 1000 cubic centimetres. In other words, the brain capacity of this primitive ape-man was about equal to that of some of the exceptionally low existing savages, and somewhat less than midway between that of the highest anthropoid ape and the average civilized man. This man lived some 500,000 years ago.

Men of science believe that the first human beings arose in Southern Asia, if not, indeed, in a region still more southerly than the present Asiatic boundary—in Lemuria, the former land extension now submerged beneath the Indian Ocean. The evidence of fossils supports this view. And it is significant that the bones of the ape-man of Java were found on the very edge of the Indian Ocean.

From Asia, the rude forefathers of our race migrated over the earth. Asia was then united to Africa, and joined hands with Europe at the Dardanelles and Sicily, and with North America at Behring Strait. Other land connections joined Africa to Europe at Gibraltar and flung a broad thoroughfare from the Dark Continent to Australia. Over these land routes and others some of our naked ancestors in humanity’s early dawn wandered from the cradle of the race in Asia and took up their habitations in the different continents and in the islands of the seas.

There are numerous species of the Baboon as of the other “true apes”—a name applied to them as animals that run on all fours. The Baboons are now confined to Africa and Arabia, though they formerly inhabited India. They have short tails, short, strong limbs, hands and feet remarkably like human hands and feet, and well-developed brains. They go in troops, following the lead of a patriarch and guarded by a sentinel. They attack other animals and make raids on property. “They are sometimes caught by being intoxicated with liquor purposely exposed near their haunts, fondness for stimulants being one of their often observed vices.”—“Chamber’s Encyclopaedia.” “The Anubis Baboons, as shown by the frescoes, were tamed by the ancient Egyptians and trained to pluck sycamore figs from the trees.”—“The Encyclopaedia Britannica.”]

Since 1848, numerous fossil remains of man have been found, first, at Gibraltar, and later in Germany, Belgium, France, England, the Caucasus, Africa, and North and South America. These bones, which range from fragments of skulls, jaws and teeth to entire skeletons, represent various stages of human development from ape-like creatures to modern man. The possessors of some of these bones were “missing links” in our ancestry.

In 1911, a remarkable skull, which is believed to be approximately 400,000 years old, was found at Piltdown, in Sussex, England. This skull is essentially human in its smooth forehead, the absence of bulging ridges over the eyes, and in the development of the bones of the brain case. The brain it held was about equal in size to that of the savages of Australia. Yet it is remarkably flat and very thick, like that of an anthropoid ape. The teeth are longer than in modern man and bulging, and the prominent canines are distinctly ape-like, while the chin retreats in heavy jaws. Uniting as he did such decidedly human and ape-like characters, the owner of this skull, the Piltdown man, has been described as “man in the making” and called the “dawn man.”

The Gibbon, of which there are many species, is found in Assam, the Malay Peninsula, Java, Sumatra and Borneo. The animal is remarkable for its agility and for the weird cries with which it makes the woods resound at night. The above illustration and the following illustrations of anthropoid apes are reproduced from Professor Ernst Haeckel’s great work “The Evolution of Man,” with the permission of the publishers, Watts & Co., London.]

In the Maure sands, near Heidelberg, in 1907, there was found, in a perfect state of preservation, a complete jaw with the teeth. The relic belonged to a member of the Heidelberg race—a very low type of human being. Speaking of this discovery in his “Men of the Old Stone Age,”; Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, after describing it as “one of the most important in the whole history of anthropology,” says it is “unquestionably human from the nature of the teeth,” and adds that it “ranks not far from the point of separation between man and the anthropoid apes.” Professor Osborn estimates the age of this human relic at about 250,000 years.

The Heidelberg race was followed by the Neanderthal race, which entered Europe probably from Africa. All the physical features of Neanderthal man (Fig 31), unite in constituting him a “distinct species of man.” Though he bore in his body the obvious marks of his simian origin—heavy, overhanging eyebrows, a markedly retreating forehead, large jaws and a diminutive chin—he nevertheless possessed a signal advantage over every earlier race of creatures. He had a large head, and in the cavern of his skull he carried the largest and best brain that had so far appeared in Europe. In stature, the Neanderthal man was short, broad shouldered, stocky; his arms and legs were muscular and powerful and his hands large.

The gorilla is the largest of the man-like apes. It is distinguished from the other anthropoids by its small thumb, small ears, elongated head, a deep groove alongside the nostrils and other features. The gorilla is a black animal whose home is in West Equatorial Africa. The outstanding great toe of the gorilla and the other anthropoid apes is found, though in a less pronounced condition, among savage tribes of Asia. See the photograph of “One of the ‘Monkey Men’” in an article on the Malekula tribes in “Asia, The American Magazine On The Orient,” for June, 1921. Of this savage, Mr. Martin Johnson, the Asiatic explorer, says: “He could grasp a branch with his great flat feet as easily as I could with my hands.”]

The Neanderthal people spread over Croatia, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France and England; and in the soil of all those countries, buried now in some places to a depth of forty feet below the actual surface, they left millions of imperishable memorials of their handiwork—weapons and tools made from chipped flint and other kinds of stone—sharp weapons for throwing and cutting, and tools for dressing skins and shaving wood.

Contemporary with this early race in the wilds of Europe, were the hippopotamus and rhinoceros, the cave bear and hyena, the woolly mammoth, the giant deer, the bison, the sabre-toothed tiger and other long since extinct creatures. These the Neanderthals hunted, eating their flesh, splitting the larger bones for the marrow, opening the skulls for the brains, making anvils of the large, flat bones, and in the cold winters clothing themselves with the skins. This and more is evidenced to-day by the numerous bones of these animals which are found associated with the tools which Neanderthal man used at least 200,000 years ago.

Turning their attention to art, these people made drawings on bones and stones of various animals and human beings. The human forms are always represented in the nude, and it is noteworthy that they invariably show signs of being covered with hair.

Killed by H. Paschen, at Yaunde, in the interior of the Cameroons, and stuffed by Umlauff.]

The Neanderthal race had its day and disappeared from Europe. Perhaps it was greatly reduced by the rigors of the fourth glacial period. Perhaps its remaining numbers were decimated in wars with a superior people; for that superior people was at hand.

Some 25,000 years ago, a new race—the Cro-Magnon people—invaded Europe. These people were from Asia. They belonged to a stock totally different from the Neanderthals from whom they wrested a continent. Tall in physique, with high, straight foreheads, and large, well formed brains, they were a hardy race of hunters and the most intelligent and progressive race the world then knew. Their superior industry in the working of flint everywhere superseded the Neanderthal. They had imagination, ideals, and knew the customs of civilized life. They were artists with a high sense of beauty and proportion. Their carvings on bone implements, their sculptures, and the realistic paintings on the walls of their caves represent an art whose delicate finish and superb proportion remained unrivalled in its field until the reign of the Greeks. They decorated their dead with strings of perforated shells, and with them buried flint weapons and offerings of food. Writing of these people with evident enthusiasm, Professor John M. Tyler, in “The New Stone Age in Northern Europe,” observes: “The Cro-Magnon people have excited the wonder and admiration of all anthropologists.”

The Chimpanzee is a native of West and Central Equatorial Africa. “There are various races or varieties of Chimpanzee, and all of them show a degree of black pigmentation. In one variety the skin becomes totally black; in another, pigmentation of the face and of other parts, is delayed until late in life; in others the face never becomes absolutely black.”—“Man, a History of the Human Body,” by Dr. Arthur Keith.]

In the Cro-Magnons evolution had at last produced a race of real men—men with well moulded heads, with large, competent brains, with a straight facial angle, with well formed jaws and teeth and chin, with manly eyes looking out beneath an intellectual brow and lighting up a face whose whole contour was rugged but thoroughly human.

Other races came upon the scene, and there was a mingling of races and a clashing of cultures; but the Cro-Magnons, though they declined in numbers, persisted, and became, as is believed, one of the lineal ancestral races of modern man.

The geographical centre of the European distribution of the Cro-Magnon people was at Dordogne, in southwestern France, and in the present inhabitants of Dordogne, of Brittany, and of other districts in France are found essentially the same skull formation, features and complexion as were characteristic of this remarkable type of prehistoric man. Of this unique racial continuity, Prof. Ripley, in his learned work on “The Races of Europe,” says: “It is, perhaps, the most striking instance known of a persistency of population unchanged through thousands of years.”

From Haeckel’s “Evolution of Man.” From left to right the order of the skeletons is as follows: Gibbon, Orang, Chimpanzee, Gorilla, Man.]