The most ancient skeletal remains of man / by A. Hrdlička.

  • Alex Hrdlicka
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The most ancient skeletal remains of man / by A. Hrdlička. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    were unable to revert wholly to the latter. On the whole, they kept, probably irregularly, progressing toward man, and when eventually a part of them varied so far in the direction of the human being that a complete return even to their own former kind became im- possible, then, it may be conceived, the earliest representatives of rnan were established. These earliest men doubtless from the be- ginning lacked in uniformity; some strains of them, in all likeli- hood, lacked also in vitality or in sufficient adaptability to changing conditions and have disappeared; but others kept on modifying in the upward direction until in the course of long ages they reached the various somewhat unequally advanced types of man of the present day. The above deductions concerning man’s origin seem to be justified from the study of the material now at the disposal of the anthropolo- gist. The whole process of man’s rise, viewed comprehensively, appears as a most remarkable, multiple, progressive, sustained, pos- sibly more or less irregular, and not yet finished differentiation, the exact and enduring causes of which are not well understood. The various actual species of primates lower than man may in a sense be viewed as by-products of his own evolution, partly perhaps as his distant cousins, descendants from some of the old primate stocks, or as the retarded and aberrant relatives, unable or not called upon by their environment to keep up with his progress, and slowly modi- fying more or less sui generis. The old mono- and polygenistic theories dissolve, of course, equally before these closer assumptions. The final stages of the progression toward the human form, ac- cording to such light on the subject as we now have, began toward the close of the Tertiary period. By the end of the Tertiary it seems probable that there already existed some of the transitional forms, the predecessors of the human being, approaching present man in size of skull and brain, in the character of the teeth, in stature, in the form of the pelvis, and in other particulars. It is even possible that before the close of this period man’s precursors began the use of articulate language, and thus passed the somewhat more definite functional boundary separating these forerunners from man. But the bulk of the life history of the human being proper belongs to the Quaternary period, the period of repeated advances and retrogres- sions of glacial climate over the North Temperate Zone. The oldest known human remains have been found in deposits and with the bones of extinct animals of glacial or interglacial times. As we go backward into that period we find that the human forms and in general also the products of human activities become more primi- tive. On the other hand, after the last glacial recession, some eight thousand or more years ago, man was already physically much like he is to-day.