The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind

f Man-like Creatures. § 3. The Heidelberg Sub-man. § 4. Th

ction, say that man is descended from the common ancestor of the chimpanzee, the orang-utang, and the gorilla. Some "anthropologists" have even indulged in a speculation whether mankind may not have a double or treble origin; the negro being descended from a gorilla-like ancestor, the Chinese from a chimpanzee-like ancestor, a

rocess of brain growth and general refinement. But if one examines closely into one or two differences, the gap widens. Particular stress has recently been laid upon the tread of the foot. Man walks on his toe and his heel; his great

e some of the lemurs. The baboon walks on a flat foot and all his toes, using his middle toe as his chief throw off, much as th

ace, jaws, and teeth are mere guess work (see text). The

climb well now; he climbs with caution and hesitation. His ancestors may have been running creatures for long ages. Moreover, it is to be noted that he does not swim naturally; he has to learn to swim, and that seems to point to a long-standing separation from rivers and lakes and the sea. Almost certainly that ancestor was a smaller and slighter creature than its human descendants. Conceivably the human ancestor at the opening of the Cainozoic perio

traces of the ancestors of the mammals rare and relatively unprocurable in the Mesozoic rocks, probably make the traces of possible human ancestors rare and relatively unprocurable in the Cainozoic rocks. Such knowledge as we have of the ea

of their neighbours, toiling at work that machinery could do for them in a tenth of the time, or simply playing about, to give any attention to these more interesting things. There may be, there probably are, thousands of deposits still untouched cont

s of northern India remains of some very interesting apes have been found, of which Sivapithecus and Pal?opithecus were possibly related closely to the human ancestor. Possibly these animals already used implements. Charles Darwin represents baboons as opening nuts by breaking them with stones, using stakes to prize up rocks in the hunt for ins

en so crude and simple that there was for a long time a controversy whether they were to be regarded as natural or artificial productions.[23] The date of the earliest of them is put by geologists as Pliocene-that is to say, before the First Glacial Age. They occur also throughout the First Int

hat of the chimpanzee and man, but the thigh-bone is that of a creature as well adapted to standing and running as a man, and as free, therefore, to use its hands. The creature was not a man, nor was it an arboreal ape like the chimpanzee. It was a walking ape. It has been named by naturalists Pithecanthropus erectus (the walking ape-man). We cannot say that it is a direct human an

wild cattle in their world. There were also wild horses, and the sabre-toothed tiger still abounded. There are no traces of lions or true tigers at that time in Europe, but there were bear

nown from that record for an interval of hundreds of thousands of years. It is not until we reach deposits which are stated to be of the Second

eth are human. The owner of this jaw-bone has been variously named Homo Heidelbergensis and Pal?oanthropus Heidelbergensis, according to the estimate formed of its humanity or sub-humanity by various authorities. He lived in a world not remotely unlike the world of the still earlier sub-man of the first implements; the deposits in which it is found show that there were elephants, horses, rhinoceroses, bison, a moose, and so

n 100,000 years ago and lasted 50,000 years,[27] the smashed pieces of a whole skull turn up. The deposit is a gravel which may have been derived from the washing out of still earlier gravel strata an

. It is a thick skull, thicker than that of any living race of men, and it has a brain capacity intermediate between that of Pithecanthropus and man. This creature has been named Eoanthropus, the dawn man.

ee. It is extraordinarily like that of a chimpanzee, but Dr. Keith, one of the greatest authorities in these questions, assigns it, after an exhaustive analysis in his Antiquity of Man (1915), to the sk

te the Riddle of Th

rm between the Heidelberg man and the Neanderthal man we shall presently describe. It was only related to the true ancestor of man as the orang is related to the chimpan

remains. The Fourth Glacial Age is rising towards its maximum. Man is taking to caves and leaving vestiges there; at Krapina in Croatia, at Neanderthal near Düsseldorf, at Spy, human remains have been found, skulls and bones of a creature that is certainly a man. Somewhere about 50,000 years ago, if not earlier, appeared Homo Neanderthalensis (also called Homo antiquus and Homo primigenius), a quite passable human being. His thumb was not quite equal in flexibility and usefulness to a human thumb, he stooped forward, and could not hold his head e

to gauge the extent and quality of the evidence that we possess at present upon the nature of these early human and sub-human animals. Upon these fragile Piltdown fragments alone more than a hundred books, pamph

l two miles from Piltdown, which agree with the Piltdown cranium in having superciliary ridges fairly strong for a human skull, but not anything like the great superciliary ridges of Apes. The fact one has to face is this; here you have an imperfect cranium, very thick-walled and of small cubical contents (1100 or so), but much larger in that respect than any ape's. A few yards distant from it in the same layer of gravel is found a jaw-bone having rather large pointed canines, a flat, broad symphysis, and other points about the inner face of the ramus and ridges which resemble those of the chimpanzee. Which is the more likely: (a) that these two novel fragments tending apewards from man were parts of the same individual; or (b), that the sweeping of the Wealden valley has brought there together a half-jaw and a broken cranium both more ape-like in character than any known human corresponding bits, and yet derived from two separate anthropoid bea

l argument about them. On the other hand, on the principle that hypotheses are not to be multiplied beyond

or fossil chimpanzee-like remains have been found nearer England than north equatorial Africa or North-west India, and no rem