The earliest appearance of Man on the globe has been considered by Dr. Hamy and M. de Mortillet to be in France in the middle of the Miocene age. They base their belief on flint fragments supposed to be artificially made, and on a cut upon the bone of an extinct Manatee considered to be of human handiwork. The evidence is, however, doubtful and unsatisfactory. In this age appeared such Anthropoids as Pliopithecus and the highly-developed Dryopithecus (p. 216), when the climate was tropical in mid-Europe, and warm and genial even within 8° 15′ of the North Pole. Professor Boyd-Dawkins believes that notwithstanding the favourable climate and the existence of so highly-developed an Ape as Dryopithecus, "were any Man-like animal living in the Miocene age, he might reasonably be expected to be not Man, but intermediate between Man and something else."

The Pliocene, i.e., that portion of the Tertiary period in which the genera of mammals are mostly the same as those now living—only one species is known to be identical,—is the next horizon in which human remains have been asserted to have been found. The evidence is based on a skull found in a railway cutting in France after a landslip, and on a supposed artificially incised bone; but both these data require confirmation. Senhor Ribeiro has, however, obtained in Portugal implements said to be of undoubted human manufacture in strata of this age, 1,200 feet below the surface; and it has been claimed by Professor Whitney that, in California, a skull, as well as a mortar and pestle, have been recovered from Pliocene beds. The latter evidence has also been called in question.

The discovery at Crayford and in Kent's Hole in England, and in the Grotte d'Église in France, of flint implements of human manufacture, demonstrates without doubt that Man was living in Europe in the Pleistocene age—at which time most of the species of Mammals were identical with those now living—before the climate (which had been cooling since the Miocene) had become so cold as to cause the Arctic Mammals to swarm down in front of the approaching glaciation of the Northern Hemisphere. At that epoch the River-drift Men, as they are called, would have had to contend with Wolves, Bears, and Lions; while Elephants and Rhinoceroses, Horses, Oxen, and Bison roamed wild around them. The implements of this "long-headed" race were stones, conveniently picked up and rough-hewn into rude choppers and scrapers, pointed borers, and cutting chips. There is evidence that their makers ranged across a more extended Europe than now, into Africa and continental India. After the River-drift Men, who disappeared with the Ice age, there came on the scene a race known as the Palæolithic "Cave Men." Associated with their bones there have been found, in numerous caverns, remains of the Reindeer (Cervus tarandus), the Woolly Rhinoceros (R. tichorhinus), and the Mammoth (Elephas primigenius). They were an artistic people, who have left drawings of extraordinary fidelity of the animals with which they were familiar, scratched on bones and horns of the animals themselves. Their implements were better chipped and shaped than were those of the River-drift Men. They appear to have been ignorant of the potter's art; but they clothed themselves in skins, wore teeth-ornaments, and hunted the Reindeer and other animals—they were men, as Sir A. Geikie remarks, who must have had much similarity with the Esquimo—an identification, however, which has lately been strongly contested. Many fragments of their skeletons have been found in caverns in various parts of Europe: a lower jaw and an ulna at Naulette, a skull at Cro-Magnon, a lower jaw in the Grotte des Fées at Arcy-sur-Cure (Yonne), another from the rock shelter of La Madelaine in the Dordogne; portions of skulls from Neanderthal, Cannstatt, and Gibraltar, and as far north as Derbyshire, in England. The remains are, unfortunately, all very fragmentary, and afford little more information as to the physical characters of the Palæolithic races, than that they were "long-headed." In 1886, however, in the Grotto of Spy, in the Belgian Province of Namur, were discovered two nearly complete skeletons, which showed that the Neanderthal skull, the lower jaw from Naulette, and the skulls from Cannstatt and Gibraltar all belonged to the same race. This race, which was widely spread over Europe in the Palæolithic age, presents more Simian characters than any yet unearthed. MM. Lohest and Fraipont, of Liege, who discovered and described the remains from Spy, have given in detail the following Simian characteristics which they present: The superciliary crests are far greater, and the forehead more retreating, than in any other known race—characters which closely resemble those in female and young male Orangs and Chimpanzees; and the occipital region of the skull shows a transverse crest as in some African tribes and in the above-named Anthropoid Apes. The lower jaw presents little or none of that markedly human character—the chin; and the slope of the interior (or posterior) surface of its symphysis is intermediate between that of Man and the higher Apes. The bones of the fore-arm (the ulna and radius) are curved so as to produce a space between them, wider than in any human subject, and resembling what is seen in Apes. The thigh-bone (femur) is so shaped and articulated to the leg-bone (tibia) "that in order to maintain equilibrium the head and body must have been thrown forward." This relation of the femur and tibia is found in the Apes, and it is highly probable that the Man of Spy presented a somewhat similar figure when walking; that is to say, the knees were bent and the body thrown forward. The crowns of the molar teeth of this race have, as in the lowest races of Man, four cusps, but with distinct and divergent roots, as among the Chimpanzees, but they increase in size from in front to behind, as they do in Apes. "The other and much more numerous characters of this long-headed skull, of the trunk and of the limbs, seem to be all human." (Fraipont.) "Under whatever aspect we view this [the Neanderthal] cranium ... whether we regard its vertical depression, the enormous thickness of its supra-ciliary ridges, its sloping occiput, or its long and straight squamosal suture—we meet with Ape-like characters, stamping it as the most pithecoid of human crania yet discovered." The cranial capacity being, however, about seventy-five cubic inches, "so large a mass of brain as this would alone suggest that the pithecoid tendencies indicated by the skull did not extend deep into the organisation.... In no sense, then, can the Neanderthal bones be regarded as the remains of a human being intermediate between Man and Apes." (Huxley, 1867.) "The distance which separates the Man of Spy from the modern Anthropoid Ape is undoubtedly enormous; between the Man of Spy and the Dryopithecus it is a little less. But we must be permitted to point out that if the Man of the later Quaternary age is the stock whence existing races have sprung, he has travelled a great way. From the data now obtained, it is permissible to believe that we shall be able to pursue the ancestral type of Man and the Anthropoid Apes still further, perhaps as far as the Eocene, and even beyond." (Fraipont.) As these fossil human remains are now admitted to be of the Palæolithic age of the Pleistocene period, they give some idea of "the rate of evolution of the human species, and indicate that it has not taken place at a much faster or slower pace than that of other Mammalia. And if that is so, we are warranted in the supposition that the genus Homo, if not the species which the courtesy or the irony of naturalists has dubbed sapiens, was represented in Pliocene or even Miocene times.... There is no reason to suppose that the genus Homo was confined to Europe in the Pleistocene age; it is much more probable that this, like other Mammalian genera of that period, was spread over a large extent of the surface of the globe. At that time, in fact, the climate of regions nearer the equator must have been far more favourable to the human species, and it is possible that under such conditions it may have attained a higher development than in the north." (Huxley.) Professor Huxley points out also, in the interesting article "The Aryan Question," in The Contemporary Review for November, 1890, from which we have taken the above extracts, that the Irish river-bed skulls, belonging to a dark-haired, long-headed race, and those of the Frisians, the blond, long-headed race, now living on the North German coast, unmistakably approach the Neanderthal and Spy type in many of their distinctive characters, "a sure indication" of the physiological continuity with the Pleistocene Neanderthaloid Men. The skulls of some of the Australian aboriginals and of the broad-headed people of Borreby, in Denmark, also present a remarkable similarity to the Neanderthal skull—perhaps an indication that those are characters of a stage in the pedigree of the human species before it differentiated into any of the existing races. (Huxley.)

The next palæontological evidence of Man is found in the Neolithic cavern deposits, alluvial accumulations, peat mosses, lake bottoms, pile dwellings, and shell-mounds in various parts of Europe. Between the time that Palæolithic Man left the caves he occupied, and the date when the earlier Neolithic people began to deposit fragments of the records of their history in the kitchen-midden, which they piled in front of their shelters, a long period appears to have elapsed in many districts. The objects found in these refuse-heaps are not associated with the remains of the Mammoth, the Woolly Rhinoceros, or the Elephant, but with those of animals still living, or such as have lived down to within historical times. The remains of his skeleton indicate that Neolithic Man varied very much in stature. Some were tall, some short; some had long and others broad skulls. The long-skulled people had the same tall stature and cranial peculiarities as the blue-eyed, light haired, and long-headed Xanthochroi living at the present day in Eastern Prussia, North Belgium, Northern France, and Britain, though their bony fabric "bears marks of somewhat greater ruggedness and savagery." The broad-skulled Men were short, and agreed in physical characters with the majority of the people now inhabiting the Mediterranean sea-board—the Melanochroi—with black hair and black eyes. Many Neolithic graves have given up also the remains of a tall, broad-skulled, and a short, long-skulled race.

Such are the only recovered links in the pedigree of our race, and extremely unsatisfactory they are; indeed, beyond these few spots in Western Europe, in California, and the Mississippi valley in North America, Palæontology is silent as to the history of Man, and sheds no light upon his origin, or his last pithecoid parents; for, in Professor Huxley's impressive words, "so far as that light is bright it shows him substantially as he is now, and when it grows dim it permits us to see no sign that he was other than he is now."

III.—THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE PRIMATES.

By means of the accompanying tables and maps I have attempted to present in a concise and clear manner the distribution of the Lemuroidea and the Anthropoidea in time and in space.

For the distribution of existing forms I have followed the divisions of the Globe proposed by Dr. Bowdler Sharpe in his essay on the Zoo-Geographical Areas of the World, published in "Natural Science" (Vol. III., pp. 100-108).

I. Table showing the genera of Primates peculiar to, and common to, the Old and New Worlds.

A. LEMUROIDEA.
OLD WORLD.NEW WORLD.
(Palæogæa.)(Neogæa.)
Living.Extinct.Living.Extinct.
Fam. Chiromyidæ.
Chiromys†———
Fam. Tarsiidæ.
Tarsius†———

Fam. Megaladapidæ.

Megaladapis—†——
Fam. Lemuridæ.
Perodicticus†———
Loris†———
Nycticebus†———
Galago†———
Chirogale†———
Microcebus†———
Opolemur†———
Lemur††——
Mixocebus†———
Hapalemur†———
Lepidolemur†———
Avahis†———
Propithecus†———
Indris†———
Fam. Anaptomorphidæ.
Microchærus—†——
Mixodectes———†
Cynodontomys———†
Omomys———†
Anaptomorpha———†
Plesiadapis—†——
Protoadapis—†——

Fam. Adapidæ.

Adapis—†—†
Tomitherium———†
Laopithecus———†
Pelycodus—†—†
Microsyops———†
Hyopsodus—†—†
Indrodon———†
Opisthotomus———†
Apheliscus———†
Sarcolemur———†
Hipposyus———†
Bathrodon———†
Mesacodon———†
Stenacodon———†
B. ANTHROPOIDEA.
Fam. Hapalidæ.
Hapale——††
Midas——†—
Fam. Cebidæ.
Chrysothrix——†—
Protopithecus———†
Callithrix——††

Nyctipithecus

——†—
Brachyurus——†—
Pithecia——†—
Alouatta——††
Cebus——††
Homunculus———†
Anthropops———†
Lagothrix——†—
Brachyteles——†—
Ateles——†—
Fam. Cercopithecidæ.
Papio††——
Theropithecus†———
Cynopithecus†———
Oreopithecus—†——
Macacus††——
Cercocebus†———
Cercopithecus†———
Dolichopithecus—†——
Mesopithecus—†——
Colobus††——
Semnopithecus††——
Nasalis†———

Fam. Simiidæ.

Pliopithecus—†——
Hylobates††——
Dryopithecus—†——
Simia††——
Gorilla†———
Anthropopithecus††——