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To his surprise, however, the beast, after regaining its club, advanced at his side. The great cat, flattened upon its belly, remained motionless except for twitching tail and snarling lips where it lay perhaps fifty feet beyond the body of the pithecanthropus.
If so, the pithecanthropus must have lived more than 20,000,000 years ago! So swiftly does inexorable mathematics upset this reckless theory. This calculation has been made upon the basis of the estimate of 60,000,000 years since life began, taken from Prof. H. H. Newman in "Readings in Evolution," p. 68.
So Pithecanthropus is a part of the chain leading to man, not far from the place where the human line sprang from a lower primate ancestor. Of the fossil remains of true prehistoric men, little need be said. We cannot know whether the races now living in the regions where these remains are found are really the descendants of the older types, and so a direct comparison cannot be made.
If 1800 c.c. be taken as normal instead of 1500 c.c. as some insist, these great periods since these "ape-men" existed must be enormously increased, in some cases 50%. If, on the other hand, the pithecanthropus really lived 750,000 years ago, what, with normal development, should have been its skull capacity, if life began 60,000,000 ago? Ans. 98.75%; or 1481 c.c.
R. S. Lull says, "Certain authorities have tried to prove that the pithecanthropus is nothing but a large gibbon, but the weight of authority considers it prehuman, though not in the line of direct development in humanity." Prof. In his "Men of the Old Stone Age," Dr.
More significant still is the Pithecanthropus cranium, indicative of an animal that stood midway between man and ape, a creature fully erect in posture, as its thigh bone proves, but with a brain that had attained but the halfway stage of development.
Others claim that the pithecanthropus was the end of a special branch of the apes; the Heidelberg man the last of another extinct branch; the Piltdown man and the Neanderthal man, likewise the last of other extinct species. In this case, all four finds have no evidential value whatever. All these confusing guesses from evidence so scant and uncertain, stamp evolution a "science falsely so called."
For the Early Pleistocene, apart from the Java fossil, Pithecanthropus erectus, a veritable 'missing link', whom we may here disregard as falling altogether outside our world of Europe, there are only two individuals that can with certainty be referred to this distant period. These are the Piltdown and the Heidelberg specimens.
"Worse than any troglodyte!" he told himself. "Far lower than De Quatrefage's Neanderthal man, to judge from the cephalic index worse than that Java skull, the pithecanthropus erectus, itself! And I am with my living eyes beholding them!" A slight sound, there behind him in the room, set his heart flailing madly.
In Java there were found in 1891, in strata early Quaternary or late Pliocene in age, parts of a skeleton of lower grade, if not of greater antiquity, than any human remains now known. Pithecanthropus erectus, as the creature has been named, walked erect, as its thigh bone shows, but the skull and teeth indicate a close affinity with the ape.
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