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We may take, after the Lemurs, the earliest and lowest Platyrrhines of South America, with thirty-six teeth, as the twenty-sixth stage of our genealogy; they were developed from the Lemurs by a peculiar modification of the brain, teeth, nose, and fingers. They lived during the Tertiary period, and are found fossilised in the Miocene.
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.
This classification was previously suggested by Selenka on other grounds, namely, because of the points in common in the embryonic development of the catarrhine monkeys and of man, and their common distinctiveness as contrasted with the platyrrhines. Haeckel’s Evolutionist Position.
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.
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.
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.
The apes of the New World, or the Platyrrhines, form a divergent branch of our genealogical tree, and this is only distantly related at its root to the human race.
We can assuredly construct an approximate picture in the imagination of the form of our early Tertiary ancestors from the foregoing facts of comparative anatomy; however we may frame this in detail, it will be the picture of a true ape, and a distinct catarrhine ape. All the structural characters that distinguish the Catarrhines from the Platyrrhines are found in man.
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?
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