had diverged from each other. Now, this divergence almost certainly took place as early as the Miocene period, because in the Upper Miocene deposits of Western Europe remains of two species of ape have been found allied to the gibbons, one of them, Dryopithecus, nearly as large as a man, and believed by M. Lartet to have approached man in its dentition more than the existing apes. We seem hardly, therefore, to have reached, in the Upper Miocene, the epoch of the common ancestor of man and the anthropoids.
The evidence of the antiquity of man himself is also scanty, and takes us but very little way back into the past. We have clear proof of his existence in Europe in the latter stages of the glacial epoch, with many indications of his presence in interglacial or even pre-glacial times; while both the actual remains and the works of man found in the auriferous gravels of California deep under lava-flows of Pliocene age, show that he existed in the New World at least as early as in the Old.[1] These earliest remains of man have been received with doubt, and even with ridicule, as if there were some extreme improbability in them. But, in point of fact, the wonder is that human remains have not been found more frequently in pre-glacial deposits. Referring to the most ancient fossil remains found in Europe—the Engis and Neanderthal crania,—Professor Huxley makes the following weighty remark: "In conclusion, I may say, that the fossil remains of Man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by the modification of which he has, probably, become what he is." The Californian remains and works of art, above referred to, give no indication of a specially low form of man; and it remains an unsolved problem why no traces of the long line of man's ancestors, back to the remote period when he first branched off from the pithecoid type, have yet been discovered.
It has been objected by some writers—notably by Professor Boyd Dawkins—that man did not probably exist in Pliocene times, because almost all the known mammalia of that epoch are distinct species from those now living on the earth, and that the same changes of the environment which led to
- ↑ For a sketch of the evidence of Man's Antiquity in America, see The Nineteenth Century for November 1887.
