Evolution / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson.

  • Patrick Geddes
Date:
[1911?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    105/264 (page 101)
    these exalted powers—man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” Man’s antiquity is to be measured not in centuries but in millennia. It is perhaps 150,000 years since he used stone weapons in Europe against mammoth and rhinoceros, hyaena and lion, and these weapons were not the work of novices. No fossil remains of man have been found except in Post-Tertiary (Diluvial) deposits, but there are several reasons for believing that his origin was very much earlier. Thus, for instance, it is cer¬ tain that he did not arise from any of the known anthropoid apes (gorilla, chimpanzee, orang and gibbon), but from a stock common to them and to him; therefore it is likely that the human stock had diverged before the time when the anthropoid apes are known to have been established as a distinct family, namely, in the Miocene. It is possible that man arose as a mutation, as an anthropoid genius in short, but the factors that led to his emergence are all unknown. We must remember, however, that the stock of Primates to which he is zoologically affiliated is marked by great in¬ telligence, and that we find illustrated amongst them some very significant habits—of walking