Note 184 — VI HUMAN HISTORY

Professor Wood Jones, basing his conclusions on comparative anatomy, has lately put forward a view of the course of human evolution somewhat at variance with that outlined above. He sums up his view by saying that ‘Homo is not descended from the anthropoid apes preceded by a series of Primate forms represented by Old World Monkeys, New World Monkeys, and Lemurs. For we have seen that the anatomical characters of man demand rather a recognition of the finding that his stock branched off from the very root of the Primates; that man has evolved entirely by generalized development of the brain, and that he retains the bodily simplicity only found in some such far distant progenitor as the Tarsius stock; that no matter what may be the relation of the New World and Old World Monkeys, the human race combines, in some instances, a blend of their characters; that the anthropoid apes retain a certain, and a varying, amount of the basal simplicity that belongs to man, but that the Old World Monkeys have specialized far away from this simplicity. Regarded in this way we may say that the line of Homo springs from the base of the (non-Lemurine) Primate stem and not from its systematic apex’ (‘Origin of Man’, p. 126, in Animal Life and Human Progress, edited by Dendy). In this view therefore the human stock has been separate from the rest of the primate stock since early in the Tertiary period. If this conclusion is well founded, the argument derived from the course of evolution as outlined above is certainly weakened.