CREATION BY EVOLUTION
come to the much fuller record supplied by the fossils of the Age of Mammals, estimated by Barrell to be about sixty million years in duration, with its six great epochs—Palaeocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene.
Origin and Evolution of the Primates, Including Man
Throughout this enormously long period, which was short, however, compared to some of its predecessors, the fossil records are relatively abundant for some great orders of mammals, such as the hoofed mammals, and extremely meagre for the primates. In western North America at the beginning of the Palaeocene epoch, some sixty million years ago, there lived relatives of the existing tree shrews, and in the next higher beds (Lower Eocene) we find the ancient relatives of the lemurs and tarsioids, which are found also in the Eocene of Europe. In the Lower Oligocene beds of Egypt have been found two lower jaws of extraordinary interest, one (Parapithecus) combining the characters of the tarsioids and the anthropoids, the other representing a primitive pro-anthropoid ancestral to the gibbons and perhaps to the branch leading to the higher apes and man. In the Miocene and Pliocene beds of India and Europe we find the broken jaws of possibly a dozen kinds of anthropoid apes, some of which (Dryopithecus) appear from the details of their teeth to be closely related both to the existing anthropoids and to man. In the Upper Pliocene beds we find possible traces of early man in the shape of crude flint implements; in the Pleistocene beds have been found the remains of many individuals of the Neanderthal race in Europe; also the famous skull of Pithecanthropus, in Java. In the closing stages of the Pleistocene epoch the modernized Homo sapiens appears.
Although the fossil record of the evolution of the Primates
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