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Updated: May 4, 2025
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.
It was, in short, the actual prototype of that hypothetical creature which Haeckel, in his genealogical tree, had christened pithecanthropus, the ape-man. As such it was christened Pithecanthropus erectus, the erect ape-man.
In this primeval setting the great pithecanthropus aroused no jarring discord for he was as much a part of it as the trees that grew upon the summit of the cliff or those that hid their feet among the dank ferns in the bottom of the gorge.
If the scattered remains of the pithecanthropus were found in the sand only 40 ft. below the surface, and the rate of accumulation were no greater than the slow accretions that buried the mountain city of Jerusalem 20 feet deep in 1900 years, what would be the extreme age of these remains? Ans. 3800 years, instead of 750,000 years.
But, after all, there is something very taking about a prophecy fulfilled, and so the appearance of Pithecanthropus erectus created no small sensation in the zoological world. He was hailed by Haeckel and his followers as the veritable "missing link," and as such gained immediate notoriety.
With a wave of his hand Tarzan invited his guest to partake of the remains of his savage repast, and the other, leaping nimbly as a little monkey to the lower branches of the tree, made his way quickly to the flesh, assisted always by his long, strong sinuous tail. The pithecanthropus ate in silence, cutting small strips from the deer's loin with his keen knife.
A generation which travels sixty miles an hour must be five times as civilised as one which only travels twelve. It is not certain that there has been much change in our intellectual and moral adornments since pithecanthropus dropped the first half of his name.
These, of course, furnish data of a very tangible and convincing kind; but the evidence in its totality includes also a host of data from the realms of embryology and comparative anatomy data which, as already suggested, enabled Professor Haeckel to predicate the existence of pithecanthropus long in advance of his actual discovery.
In accounting for the origin of animals nothing gives him pause. He has a reply to everything: "this" comes from "that." If you ask him why, he answers: "Look at the resemblance!" Shall we reproach him with these insanities, when we hear another, misled by the Monkey's build, acclaim the Pithecanthropus as man's precursor?
The claim that the pithecanthropus, the Heidelberg man, the Piltdown man, and the Neanderthal man, were the ancestors of man, collapses under the admissions of evolutionists themselves.
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