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Updated: June 21, 2025
At the lowest stage, the rude we may say animal phase of prehistoric primitive man, is the "ape-man," who, in the course of the tertiary period, has only to a limited degree raised himself above his immediate pithecoid ancestors, the anthropoid apes.
It will win affectionate reverence in life and a gratifying gravestone at life's end. Greatest gift to man. It finds him grovelling here a pithecoid littleness. The rough hair is gone from his body. His thumb has lost its monkey smallness; he walks flat on his feet. But beyond that he has naught else to thank material nature for. All the rest comes to him from imagination.
Under whatever aspect we view this cranium, whether we regard its vertical depression, the enormous thickness of its supraciliary ridges, its sloped occiput, or its long and straight squamosal suture, we meet with ape-like characters, stamping it as the most pithecoid of human crania yet discovered.
Furthermore, the Borreby skull resembles the Neanderthal form more closely than any of the Australian skulls do, by the much more rapid retrocession of the forehead. In conclusion, I may say, that the fossil remains of Man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by the modification of which he has, probably, become what he is.
So large a mass of brain as this, would alone suggest that the pithecoid tendencies, indicated by this skull, did not extend deep into the organization; and this conclusion is borne out by the dimensions of the other bones of the skeleton given by Professor Schaaffhausen, which show that the absolute height and relative proportions of the limbs were quite those of an European of middle stature.
Here we are all fighting most furiously about Celts and flint implements, struggle for life, natural selection, the age of the world, races of men, biblical dates, apes, and gorillas, etc., and the last duel has been between Owen and Huxley on the anatomical distinction of the pithecoid brain compared with that of man.
Where, then, must we look for primaeval Man? Was the oldest 'Homo sapiens' pliocene or miocene, or yet more ancient? In still older strata do the fossilized bones of an Ape more anthropoid, or a Man more pithecoid, than any yet known await the researches of some unborn paleontologist? Time will show.
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.
The largest cranium of any Gorilla yet measured contained 34.5 cubic inches. The Neanderthal cranium stands, therefore, in capacity, very nearly on a level with the mean of the two human extremes, and very far above the pithecoid maximum.
Homotheism. In the region of poetry such personifications are both pleasing and legitimate. In the region of science they are quite inadmissible; they are doubly objectionable now that we know that only in late Tertiary times was man developed from pithecoid mammals.
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