An intercommunication of life over a vast area extending 6,000 miles from the Thames valley on the west to India on the southeast is indicated by the presence of six or more similar or related species of elephants and rhinoceroses. Twenty-five hundred miles southeast of the foot-hills of the Himalayas similar herds of mammals, but in an earlier stage of evolution, roamed over the island of Java, which was then a part of the Asiatic mainland.
The Trinil Race of Java
The human interest in this great life throng lies in the fact that the migration routes opened by these great races of animals may also have afforded a pathway for the earliest races of men. Thus the discovery of the Trinil race in central Java, amidst a fauna closely related to that of the foot-hills of the Himalayas and more remotely related to that of southern Europe, has a more direct bearing upon our subject than would at first appear.
Fig. 29. Restoration of Pithecanthropus, the Java ape-man, modelled by the Belgian artist Mascré, under the direction of Professor A. Rutot, of Brussels, Belgium.
Fig. 30. The Solo or Bengawan River in central Java. Scene of the discovery of the type specimen of Pithecanthropus erectus in 1894. After Selenka and Blanckenhorn. Compare map (Fig. 32, p. 75).
On the Bengawan River in central Java, a Dutch army surgeon, Eugen Dubois, had been excavating for fossils in the hope of finding prehuman remains. In the year 1891 he found near Trinil a deposit of numerous mammal bones, including a single upper molar tooth which he regarded as that of a new species of ape. On carefully clearing away the rock the top of a skull appeared at about a meter's distance from the tooth. Further excavation at the close of the rainy season brought to light a second molar tooth and a left thigh-bone about 15 meters from the spot where the skull was found, imbedded and fossilized in the same manner. These scattered parts were described by Dubois[(13)] in 1894 as the type of Pithecanthropus erectus,[O] a term signifying the upright-standing ape-man. The specific term erectus refers to the thigh-bone, of which the author observes: "We must therefore conclude that the femur of Pithecanthropus was designed for the same mechanical functions as that of man. The two articulations and the mechanical axis correspond so exactly to the same parts in man that the law of perfect harmony between the form and function of a bone will necessitate the conclusion that this fossil creature had the same upright posture as man and likewise walked on two legs.... From this it necessarily follows that the creature had the free use of the upper extremities—now superfluous for walking—and that these last were no doubt already far advanced in that line of differentiation which developed them in mankind into tools and organs of touch.... From a study of the femur and skull it follows with certainty that this fossil cannot be classified as simian.... And, as with the skull, so also with the femur, the differences that separate Pithecanthropus from man are less than those distinguishing it from the highest anthropoid.... Although far advanced in the course of differentiation, this Pleistocene form had not yet attained to the human type. Pithecanthropus erectus is the transition form between man and the anthropoids which the laws of evolution teach us must have existed. He is the ancestor of man."
Thus the author placed Pithecanthropus in a new family, of the order Primates, which he named the Pithecanthropidæ.