Pithecanthropus

“ But, on the hypothesis here considered, the species Pithecanthropus erectus would not have disappeared. Having become a human race, it could not remain at the same time a race anthropoid. If the Pithecanthropus was only a simple precursor, it was superior enough to the other animals to survive unless the human species, springing up all of a sudden, "from the clay of the earth," did not hasten to annihilate this dangerous competitor. But if the Pithecanthropus was an ancestor, its species lives yet in its human descendants. ”

“ All the remains are certainly anthropoid, and if any of them are human, the antiquity of man extends back into the Tertiary, and his affinities with the higher apes become much nearer than has hitherto been supposed. One thing is certain: the discovery of Pithecanthropus is an event of the first importance to the scientific world. ”

“ Those who have followed the history of the Neanderthal skull are aware that there has never existed regarding it such divergence of opinion as to its man- or ape-like qualities as has arisen concerning the Pithecanthropus. The two opposed views in that case were: Ape-like man or diseased man; the native of the Neanderthal has from the very first always been considered as an undoubted, real man. The human character of the Pithecanthropus is, however, very questionable. The skull of the gibbon almost doubled in size would not be very different from it in external appearance. ”

“ Pithecanthropus. The remains of Pithecanthropus were recovered from an alluvial deposit at Trinil. A section of this is shewn in Fig. 19. An idea may thus be gained of the very considerable amount of superincumbent materials. The associated fauna cannot be compared directly to that of any Western European locality. But in comparison with the modern fauna of Java, the strata in which the Pithecanthropus was found shew a predominance of extinct species, though not of genera. ”

“ In fact, a human thigh-bone may be much less straight and less slender than that of arboreal animals such as the Gibbon, the Cebus monkey, or the Lemurs (especially Nycticebus) . The [Pg 9] famous Eppelsheim femur is straighter than, and as slender as that of Pithecanthropus. It was regarded at first as that of a young woman, but is now ascribed to an anthropoid ape. And in fact, even if the skull-cap and thigh-bone of Pithecanthropus should be retained in association, it seems that the title ‘erectus’ is not fully justified. ”

“ His contention that the skull and the femur of Pithecanthropus could not have belonged together, that the first belonged to an ape and the second to a man, was rejected at once by the expert paleontologists present, who declared unanimously that, in view of the extremely careful and conscientious account of the discovery "there could not the slightest doubt exist that the remains belonged to one and the same individual." ”

“ Some have regarded the remains as those of a large gibbon, others as those of a pre-human ape-man, and others as those of a primitive man off the main line of ascent. According to Sir Arthur Keith, Pithecanthropus was "a being human in stature, human in gait, human in all its parts, save its brain." The thigh-bone indicates a height of about 5 feet 7 inches, one inch less than the average height of the men of to-day. The skull-cap indicates a low, flat forehead, beetling brows, and a capacity about two-thirds of the modern size. ”

“ According to the contrary opinion, the Pithecanthropus represents one of those fossil human races that the theory foresaw, for it is morphologically intermediate, by its skull, between the lowest human races and the anthropoid type. A partisan of the theory of evolution has no repugnance to considering that race as human and to saying "the man of Trinil," since, according to the theory, the chain AD is necessarily uninterrupted. ”

“ As we said, he may turn out to be a link to the australopithecines, who may or may not be ancestral to men. Meganthropus is best understandable in terms of Pithecanthropus, who appeared later in the same general area. Pithecanthropus is pretty well understandable from the bones he left us, and also because of his strong resemblance to the fully tool-using cave-dwelling “Peking man,” Sinanthropus, about whom we shall talk next. But you can see that the physical anthropologists and prehistoric archeologists still have a lot of work to do on the problem of earliest men. ”

“ Ice Age of Europe. For even in Java one can distinguish three divisions of the Pleistocene period, including the first period of low temperature to which the Pithecanthropus layer is referred.
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Fig. 33. Section corresponding to line A-B in Fig. 32, showing the river-drift gravels and sands at the point where the skull-top of Pithecanthropus was found. Drawn by C. A. Reeds.
The fossil mammals contained in the Pithecanthropus layer have also been thoroughly studied, (19) and they tend to confirm the original reference to the uppermost Pliocene. ”

“ O. C. Marsh, American Journ. of Science (June 1896) ; “Le Pithecanthropus et l’origine de l’homme,” in Bull. de la soc. d’anthrop. de Paris (1896) , pp. 460–67; L. Manouvrier, “Discussion du pithecanthropus erectus comme précurseur de l’homme,” in Bull. soc. ”

“ And the results of many tests of this kind, applied not only by Professor Dubois but also by Professor Schwalbe, are confirmatory of the ‘intermediate’ position claimed for Pithecanthropus erectus. The molar teeth are of inadequate size if the skull-cap is that of an ape, whereas they are slightly larger than the corresponding teeth furnished by primitive existing human types. ”

“ The Pithecanthropus would represent then that inferior phase of human evolution in which the intellectual and cerebral improvement would have been just enough so that the development of the upper portion of the skull would not be left in arrears any more than it is in the young anthropoid compared to the basilar development correlative to the corporeal growth in general. Among the lowest existing human races, this stage of evolution is largely exceeded for the normal individual. The difference is yet greater for the average among European races. ”

“ Pithecanthropus is regarded by some authorities as the direct ancestor of man, by others as a side-track failure in the attempt at the evolution of man. The problem of the monophyletic or polyphyletic origin of the human race has also been much discussed. Sergi [124] inclines towards the assumption of a polyphyletic origin of the three main races of man, the African primitive form of which [144] has given rise also to the gorilla and chimpanzee, the Asiatic to the Orang, the Gibbon, and Pithecanthropus. ”

“ The theory that the hypothetical pithecanthropus was the progenitor of man is no longer held by any competent anthropologist. If we place the fossil remains discovered by Dubois in the island of Java in this class the argument is not strengthened, the chief objection being its comparatively late date. ”

“ If we may judge from these fossil remains, the bones of Pithecanthropus are not younger than the oldest Pleistocene, and probably belong to the upper Pliocene. The teeth are like those of man. The femur, also, is very human, but shows some resemblances to that of the gibbons. Its size, however, indicates an animal which stood when erect not less than 5 feet 6 inches high. The [Pg 24] skull-cap also is very human, but with very prominent eyebrow ridges, like those of the famous Neanderthal cranium. It is certainly not that of an idiot. ”

“ There is, however, an enormous gap between even Pithecanthropus and the recent anthropoids, and, indeed, it seems certain that the latter cannot be regarded as coming into the direct line of human descent, but both these and existing human races must trace back to a common ancestor, whose characteristics are perhaps indicated in the cranial peculiarities of young anthropoids. ”

“ All the inferior human crania which it would be possible to show as approaching the form of Trinil by certain characters would make up very well for the absence of the better specimens of the race Pithecanthropus. But it will be difficult to find, among normal human skulls, specimens as pithecoid as that of Trinil. We see frequently in a race such and such individual characters recalling an ancestral type, for it is easier to descend than to ascend in matters of evolution ”

“ Beginning with Pithecanthropus, which science is yet in doubt whether to class with the apes or with men, we pass upward to the bestial Neanderthal man and his fellows of the same low type. Of the sparse remains of palæolithic man that exist, the most are of this degraded type. The cranial capacity is usually not small. They had the full brain development of man. But this simply assimilates them with the low races of existing savages, many of whom have not developed the simple art of chipping stone to form weapons and yet have brains of normal human weight. ”

“ An attempt has been made to reconstruct an individual (the Tetraprothomo of Ameghino) to which the two bones should be referred. It will be noticed that the circumstances bear some, although a very faint, analogy to those in which the remains of Pithecanthropus were found. The results are however extraordinarily different. Professor Branco has ably shewn that in the case of the bones from Monte Hermoso, the association in one and the same skeleton would provide so large a skull in proportion to the rest of the body, that the result becomes not only improbable, but impossible. ”

“ Very recently, however, have been found, by Du Bois, in Java, the skull, teeth, and thigh bone of what seems to be a veritable missing link, named by the discoverer Pithecanthropus erectus. The only question that seems to remain is whether it should be regarded as an ape more manlike than any known ape, or a man more apelike than any yet discovered. ”

“ We would not expect to find a missing link that was actually intermediate in all respects between modern apes and modern men, any more than we should look for actual connecting bands of tissue between any two leaves upon a tree. A missing link, in the true sense, is like a bud of earlier years which stood near the point from which two twigs of the present day now diverge. So Pithecanthropus is a part of the chain leading to man, not far from the place where the human line sprang from a lower primate ancestor. ”

“ Let us follow the descent of man further back. The next stage, reckoning backwards, is that from Pithecanthropus to bonâ-fide anthropoid apes. They are represented in the Miocene by various genera—e.g., Pliopithecus and Dryopithecus. According to Croll and Wallace, 850,000 years ago carry us [Pg 151] into the Miocene epoch. Assuming that these apes lived about 600,000 years before Pithecanthropus, namely, in the later half of the Miocene, and taking puberty at ten years of age, a high estimate, we get not less than 60,000 generations. ”

“ As on the one hand there has been found in Pithecanthropus a form which, though intermediate between apes and man, is nevertheless more closely allied to the apes, so on the other hand, much progress has been made since Darwin's day in the discovery and description of the oldest human remains. ”

“ Thus we have evidences of the great antiquity of man and a series of remains showing continual advancement over a period of nearly 500,000 years—the Pithecanthropus, Heidelberg, Piltdown, and Neanderthal, though expressing gradations of development in the order named, appear to be unrelated in their origin and descent, and are classed as separate species long since extinct. The Crô-Magnon people seem more directly related to modern man. ”

“ But, if we suppose that collections of crania richer than those that we possess would permit us to find upon human crania all the characters of inferiority noticed on the Pithecanthropus and to a degree as pronounced, the skull from Java would present none the less this peculiarity: that it brings together a group of characters all of them the limit for the human race. ”

“ Here we find described a creature of Pliocene age, presenting a form so extraordinary as hardly to be considered [Pg 3] human, placed so it seems between the human and simian tribes. It is Caliban, a missing link,—in fact a Pithecanthropus.
With the erect attitude and a stature surpassing that of many modern men were combined the heavy brows and narrow forehead of a flattened skull, containing little more than half the weight of brain possessed by an average European. The molar teeth were large with stout and divergent roots. ”

“ The remains consisted of the walls of the skull, which indicate a large brain, and a high forehead without the beetling eyebrows of the Neanderthal man and Pithecanthropus. The "find" included a tooth and part of a lower jaw, but these perhaps belong to some ape, for they are very discrepant. The Piltdown skull represents the most ancient human remains as yet found in Britain, and Dr. Smith Woodward's establishment of a separate genus Eoanthropus expresses his conviction that the Piltdown man was off the line of the evolution of the modern type. ”

“ While opinions differ with respect to the remains of man taken from the many caves and mounds of Europe and America, there is but one generally accepted view regarding the ape-man Pithecanthropus of the Javan rocks. The remains of this animal prove among other things that its brain was intermediate between the average ape brain and the average human brain, that the animal was indeed an ape-man and nothing else. ”

“ It is the superior portion of the intermediate race which can have survived and formed an inferior human race. This latter must then present characters superior to the average of its ancestors, even independently of the progress that this human race can have realized since the Pliocene epoch. The existence of human crania presenting at once the ensemble of the cranial characters of Pithecanthropus has not yet been demonstrated, unless we take into account the microcephaly more or less accentuated, that is to say, a veritable anomaly by arrest of development. ”