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Updated: May 4, 2025
2 The Peking Man Man makes his appearance in the Far East at a time when remains in other parts of the world are very rare and are disputed. He appears as the so-called "Peking Man", whose bones were found in caves of Chou-k'ou-tien south of Peking. The Peking Man is vastly different from the men of today, and forms a special branch of the human race, closely allied to the Pithecanthropus of Java.
Seeing that they could not make each other understood, the pithecanthropus advanced toward Tarzan and placing his left hand over his own heart laid the palm of his right hand over the heart of the ape-man.
It is possible, indeed, that man reached the northern continent from another locality, the habitat of the Negrito race in southeastern Asia and the Malaysian islands. The fossil man-ape of Java, Pithecanthropus, is a strong argument that this was the region, or one of the regions, in which the development of man took place.
Was it before the days of the pithecanthropus, the Piltdown fraud, the Heidelberg man, or the Neanderthal man? The change was ever so slow and gradual; could the parents, anywhere along the line, be mere brutes and the children immortal human beings? Would it not be impossible to draw the line?
Gibbon-like fossil apes are known, in strata representing a time some millions of years antecedent to the epoch of pithecanthropus even, which are held to be directly of the royal line through which pithecanthropus, and the hypothetical Homo stupidus, and the known Homo neanderthalensis, and, lastly, proud Homo sapiens himself have descended.
The intermediate character is shown especially in the head form. If an ape, Pithecanthropus had an enormous brain; if a man, he must have verged on what we should consider idiocy. Also standing somewhat by itself is the Heidelberg man. All that we have of him is a well-preserved lower jaw with its teeth.
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."
The poor relation is objectionable not so much because he is poor as because he is a relation. So, perhaps, it is not the apeness, so to speak, of the ape that is objectionable, but rather the human-ness. In any event, the aversion has been matter of common notoriety ever since the Darwinian theory became fully accepted; it showed itself now with renewed force against poor pithecanthropus.
Next he touched upon the Indians, and upon the extraordinary colony of anthropoid apes, which might be looked upon as an advance upon the pithecanthropus of Java, and as coming therefore nearer than any known form to that hypothetical creation, the missing link.
"There no longer exists," he says, "a 'missing link. The phyletic continuity of the primate stem, from the oldest lemurs down to man himself, is an historical fact." It should, perhaps, be added that the force of this rather startling conclusion rests by no means exclusively upon the finding of pithecanthropus and the other fossils, nor indeed upon any paleontological evidence whatever.
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