The Evolution of Man, V.2 by Ernst Haeckel (comprehension books .TXT) 📕

We must, therefore, consider the descent of man from other Catarrhines to be fully proved. Whatever further information on the comparative anatomy and ontogeny of the living Catarrhines we may obtain in the future, it cannot possibly disturb this conclusion. Naturally, our Catarrhine ancestors must have passed through a long series of different forms before the human type was produced. The chief advances that effected this "creation of man," or his differentiation from the nearest related Catarrhines, were: the adoption of the erect posture and the consequent greater differentiation of the fore and hind limbs, the evolution of articulate speech and its organ, the larynx, and the further development of the brain and its function, the soul; sexual selection had a great influence in this, as Darwin showed in his famous work.

With an eye to these advances we can distinguish at least four important stages in our simian ancestry, which represent prominent points in the historical process of the making of man. We may take, after the Lemurs, the earliest and lowest Platyrrhines of South America, with thirty-six teeth, as the twenty-sixth stage of our genealogy; they were developed from the Lemurs by a peculiar modification of the brain, teeth, nose, and fingers. From these Eocene stem-apes were formed the earliest Catarrhines or eastern apes, with the human dentition (thirty-two teeth), by modification of the nose, lengthening of the bony channel of the ear, and the loss of four pre-molars. These oldest stem-forms of the whole Catarrhine group were still thickly coated with hair, and had long tails--baboons (Cynopitheca) or tailed apes (Menocerca, Figure 2.276). They lived during the Tertiary period, and are found fossilised in the Miocene. Of the actual tailed apes perhaps the nearest to them are the Semnopitheci.

If we take these Semnopitheci as the twenty-seventh stage in our ancestry, we may put next to them, as the twenty-eighth, the tail-less anthropoid apes. This name is given to the most advanced and man-like of the existing Catarrhines. They were developed from the other Catarrhines by losing the tail and part of the hair, and by a higher development of the brain, which found expression in the enormous growth of the skull. Of this remarkable family there are only a few genera to-day, and we have already dealt with them (

Chapter 1.

15)--the gibbon (Hylobates, Figure 1.203) and orang (Satyrus, Figures 1.204 and 1.205) in South-Eastern Asia and the Archipelago; and the chimpanzee (Anthropithecus, Figures 1.206 and 1.207) and gorilla (Gorilla, Figure 1.208) in Equatorial Africa.

The great interest that every thoughtful man takes in these nearest relatives of ours has found expression recently in a fairly large literature. The most distinguished of these works for impartial treatment of the question of affinity is Robert Hartmann's little work on The Anthropoid Apes. Hartmann divides the primate order into two families: (1) Primarii (man and the anthropoid apes); and (2) Simianae (true apes, Catarrhines and Platyrrhines). Professor Klaatsch, of Heidelberg, has advanced a different view in his interesting and richly illustrated work on The Origin and Development of the Human Race. This is a substantial supplement to my Anthropogeny, in so far as it gives the chief results of modern research on the early history of man and civilisation. But when Klaatsch declares the descent of man from the apes to be "irrational, narrow-minded, and false," in the belief that we are thinking of some living species of ape, we must remind him that no competent scientist has ever held so narrow a view. All of us look merely--in the sense of Lamarck and Darwin--to the original unity (admitted by Klaatsch) of the primate stem. This common descent of all the Primates (men, apes, and lemurs) from one primitive stem-form, from which the most far-reaching conclusions follow for the whole of anthropology and philosophy, is admitted by Klaatsch as well as by myself and all other competent zoologists who accept the theory of evolution in general. He says explicitly (page 172): "The three anthropoid apes--gorilla, chimpanzee, and orang--seem to be branches from a common root, and this was not far from that of the gibbon and man." That is in the main the opinion that I have maintained (especially against Virchow) in a number of works ever since 1866. The hypothetical common ancestor of all the Primates, which must have lived in the earliest Tertiary period (more probably in the Cretaceous), was called by me Archiprimus, Klaatsch now calls it Primatoid. Dubois has proposed the appropriate name of Prothylobates for the common and much younger stem-form of the anthropomorpha (man and the anthropoid apes). The actual Hylobates is nearer to it than the other three existing anthropoids. None of these can be said to be absolutely the most man-like. The gorilla comes next to man in the structure of the hand and foot, the chimpanzee in the chief features of the skull, the orang in brain development, and the gibbon in the formation of the chest. None of these existing anthropoid apes is among the direct ancestors of our race; they are scattered survivors of an ancient branch of the Catarrhines, from which the human race developed in a particular direction.

(FIGURE 2.283. Skull of the fossil ape-man of Java (Pithecanthropus erectus), restored by Eugen Dubois.)

Although man is directly connected with this anthropoid family and originates from it, we may assign an important intermediate form between the Prothylobates and him (the twenty-ninth stage in our ancestry), the ape-men (Pithecanthropi). I gave this name in the History of Creation to the "speechless primitive men" (Alali), which were men in the ordinary sense as far as the general structure is concerned (especially in the differentiation of the limbs), but lacked one of the chief human characteristics, articulate speech and the higher intelligence that goes with it, and so had a less developed brain. The phylogenetic hypothesis of the organisation of this "ape-man" which I then advanced was brilliantly confirmed twenty-four years afterwards by the famous discovery of the fossil Pithecanthropus erectus by Eugen Dubois (then military surgeon in Java, afterwards professor at Amsterdam). In 1892 he found at Trinil, in the residency of Madiun in Java, in Pliocene deposits, certain remains of a large and very man-like ape (roof of the skull, femur, and teeth), which he described as "an erect ape-man" and a survivor of a "stem-form of man" (Figure 2.283). Naturally, the Pithecanthropus excited the liveliest interest, as the long-sought transitional form between man and the ape: we seemed to have found "the missing link." There were very interesting scientific discussions of it at the last three International Congresses of Zoology (Leyden, 1895, Cambridge, 1898, and Berlin, 1901). I took an active part in the discussion at Cambridge, and may refer the reader to the paper I read there on "The Present Position of Our Knowledge of the Origin of Man" (translated by Dr. Gadow with the title of The Last Link).

An extensive and valuable literature has grown up in the last ten years on the Pithecanthropus and the pithecoid theory connected with it. A number of distinguished anthropologists, anatomists, paleontologists, and phylogenists have taken part in the controversy, and made use of the important data furnished by the new science of pre-historic research. Hermann Klaatsch has given a good summary of them, with many fine illustrations, in the above-mentioned work. I refer the reader to it as a valuable supplement to the present work, especially as I cannot go any further here into these anthropological and pre-historic questions. I will only repeat that I think he is wrong in the attitude of hostility that he affects to take up with regard to my own views on the descent of man from the apes.

The most powerful opponent of the pithecoid theory--and the theory of evolution in general--during the last thirty years (until his death in September, 1902) was the famous Berlin anatomist, Rudolf Virchow. In the speeches which he delivered every year at various congresses and meetings on this question, he was never tired of attacking the hated "ape theory." His constant categorical position was: "It is quite certain that man does not descend from the ape or any other animal." This has been repeated incessantly by opponents of the theory, especially theologians and philosophers. In the inaugural speech that he delivered in 1894 at the Anthropological Congress at Vienna, he said that "man might just as well have descended from a sheep or an elephant as from an ape." Absurd expressions like this only show that the famous pathological anatomist, who did so much for medicine in the establishment of cellular pathology, had not the requisite attainments in comparative anatomy and ontogeny, systematic zoology and paleontology, for sound judgment in the province of anthropology. The Strassburg anatomist, Gustav Schwalbe, deserved great praise for having the moral courage to oppose this dogmatic and ungrounded teaching of Virchow, and showing its untenability. The recent admirable works of Schwalbe on the Pithecanthropus, the earliest races of men, and the Neanderthal skull (1897 to 1901) will supply any candid and judicious reader with the empirical material with which he can convince himself of the baselessness of the erroneous dogmas of Virchow and his clerical friends (J. Ranke, J. Bumuller, etc.).

As the Pithecanthropus walked erect, and his brain (judging from the capacity of his skull, Figure 2.283) was midway between the lowest men and the anthropoid apes, we must assume that the next great step in the advance from the Pithecanthropus to man was the further development of human speech and reason.

Comparative philology has recently shown that human speech is polyphyletic in origin; that we must distinguish several (probably many) different primitive tongues that were developed independently. The evolution of language also teaches us (both from its ontogeny in the child and its phylogeny in the race) that human speech proper was only gradually developed after the rest of the body had attained its characteristic form. It is probable that language was not evolved until after the dispersal of the various species and races of men, and this probably took place at the commencement of the Quaternary or Diluvial period. The speechless ape-men or Alali certainly existed towards the end of the Tertiary period, during the Pliocene, possibly even the Miocene, period.

The third, and last, stage of our animal ancestry is the true or speaking man (Homo), who was gradually evolved from the preceding stage by the advance of animal language into articulate human speech. As to the time and place of this real "creation of man" we can only express tentative opinions. It was probably during the Diluvial period in the hotter zone of the Old World, either on the mainland in tropical Africa or Asia or on an earlier continent (Lemuria--now sunk below the waves of the Indian Ocean), which stretched from East Africa (Madagascar, Abyssinia) to East Asia (Sunda Islands, Further India). I have given fully in my History of Creation, (chapter 28) the weighty reasons for claiming this descent of man from the anthropoid eastern apes, and shown how we may conceive the spread of the various races from this "Paradise" over the whole earth. I have also dealt fully with the relations of the various races and species of men to each other.

SYNOPSIS OF THE CHIEF SECTIONS OF OUR STEM-HISTORY.

FIRST STAGE: THE PROTISTS.

Man's ancestors are unicellular protozoa, originally unnucleated Monera like the Chromacea, structureless green particles of plasm; afterwards real nucleated cells (first plasmodomous Protophyta, like the Palmella; then plasmophagous Protozoa, like the Amoeba).

SECOND STAGE: THE BLASTAEADS.

Man's ancestors are round coenobia or colonies of Protozoa; they consist of a close association of many homogeneous cells, and thus are individuals of the second