Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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.
But human blood also unites without any breaking-up or disturbance with the blood of a chimpanzee; from which the inference is that man is not to be placed in a separate sub-order beside the other sub-orders of the Primates, the platyrrhine and catarrhine monkeys, not even in a distinct sub order beside the catarrhines; but is to be included with them in one zoological sub-order.
The chief advances that effected this "creation of man," or his differentiation from the nearest related Catarrhines, were: the adoption of the erect posture and the consequent greater differentiation of the fore and hind limbs, the evolution of articulate speech and its organ, the larynx, and the further development of the brain and its function, the soul; sexual selection had a great influence in this, as Darwin showed in his famous work.
But it follows that man is a direct blood relative of the apes of the Old World, and can be traced to a common stem-form together with all the Catarrhines. In his whole organisation and in his origin man is a true Catarrhine; he originated in the Old World from an unknown, extinct group of the eastern apes.
We must, therefore, consider the descent of man from other Catarrhines to be fully proved. Whatever further information on the comparative anatomy and ontogeny of the living Catarrhines we may obtain in the future, it cannot possibly disturb this conclusion. Naturally, our Catarrhine ancestors must have passed through a long series of different forms before the human type was produced.
In answering this question the comprehensive and able studies that Huxley gives of the comparative anatomy of man and the various Catarrhines in his Man's Place in Nature are of great assistance to us. In fact, within the small group of the tail-less anthropoid apes the differences between the various genera are not less than the differences between them and man.
Word Of The Day