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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.
Before we follow the development of the human alimentary canal in detail, it is necessary to say a word about the general features of its composition in the fully-developed man. The mature alimentary canal in man is constructed in all its main features like that of all the higher mammals, and particularly resembles that of the Catarrhines, the narrow-nosed apes of the Old World.
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. 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."
This division of the apes into Platyrrhines and Catarrhines, on the ground of the above hereditary features, is now generally admitted in zoology, and receives strong support from the geographical distribution of the two groups in the east and west.
It is certain that all the Platyrrhines come of one stock, and also all the Catarrhines; but the former are phylogenetically older, and must be regarded as the stem-group of the latter. What can we deduce from this with regard to our own genealogy?
Man has just the same characters, the same form of dentition, auditory passage, and nose, as all the Catarrhines; in this he radically differs from the Platyrrhines. We are thus forced to assign him a position among the eastern apes in the order of Primates, or at least place him alongside of them.
We may even give a more precise formula to this law, by excluding the Platyrrhines or American apes as distant relatives, and restricting the comparison to the narrower family-circle of the Catarrhines, the apes of the Old World.
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. The great interest that every thoughtful man takes in these nearest relatives of ours has found expression recently in a fairly large literature.
We have now reduced the circle of our nearest relatives to the small and comparatively scanty group that is represented by the sub-order of the Catarrhines; and we are in a position to answer the question of man's place in this sub-order, and say whether we can deduce anything further from this position as to our immediate ancestors.
Now man unquestionably belongs in his dentition, in the structure of his nostrils, and some other respects, to the Catarrhine or Old World division; nor does he resemble the Platyrrhines more closely than the Catarrhines in any characters, excepting in a few of not much importance and apparently of an adaptive nature.