10. Place of Man’s Origin and Development
Before we proceed to the fossil finds themselves, we must note that the greater part of the surface of the earth has been very imperfectly explored. Africa, Asia, and Australia may quite conceivably contain untold scientific treasures which have not yet been excavated. One cannot assert that they are lying in the soil or rocks of these continents; but one also cannot affirm that they are not there. North and South America have been somewhat more carefully examined, at least in certain of their areas, but with such regularly negative results that the prevailing opinion now is that these two continents—possibly through being shut off by oceans or ice masses from the eastern hemisphere—were not inhabited by man during the Pleistocene. The origin of the human species cannot then be sought in the western hemisphere. This substantially leaves Europe as the one continent in which excavations have been carried on with prospects of success; and it is in the more thoroughly explored western half of Europe that all but two of the unquestioned discoveries of ancient man have been made. One of these exceptional finds is from Africa. The other happens to be the one that dates earliest of all—the same Pithecanthropus already mentioned as being the closest known approach to the “missing link.” Pithecanthropus was found in Java.
Now it might conceivably prove true that man originated in Europe and that this is the reason that the discoveries of his most ancient remains have to date been so largely confined to that continent. On the other hand, it does seem much more reasonable to believe that this smallest of the continents, with its temperate or cold climate, and its poverty of ancient and modern species of monkeys, is likely not to have been the true home, or at any rate not the only home, of the human family. The safest statement of the case would be that it is not known in what part of the earth man originated; that next to nothing is known of the history of his development on most of the continents; and that that portion of his history which chiefly is known is the fragment which happened to take place in Europe.
Fig. 5. Antiquity of man. This diagram is drawn to scale, proportionate to the number of years estimated to have elapsed, as far down as 100,000. Beyond, the scale is one-half, to bring the diagram within the limits of the page.