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.”
Fig. 25.—The White-handed Gibbon.
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.
Fig. 26.—A Female Gorilla.
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.”