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675 ←
Anthropoid Ape.
relationship.
The data derived from scientific research as to “primeval man” and the ape lend no countenance to theories deriving the former from the latter. “Where, then, must we look for primeval man?”—still queries Mr. Huxley, after having vainly searched for him in the very depths of the Quaternary strata.
Was the oldest Homo sapiens Pliocene or Miocene, or yet more ancient? In still older strata do the fossilized bones of an ape more anthropoid, or a man more pithecoid than any yet known, await the researches of some unborn palæontologist? Time will show.*
It will—undeniably—and thus vindicate the Anthropology of the Occultists. Meanwhile, in his eagerness to vindicate Mr. Darwin’s Descent of Man, Mr. Boyd Dawkins believes that he has all but found the “missing link”—in theory. It was due to Theologians more than to Geologists that, till nearly 1860, man had been considered as a relic no older than the Adamic orthodox 6,000 years. As Karma would have it, though, it was left to a French Abbé—Bourgeois—to give this easy-going theory even a worse blow than had been given to it by the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes. Everyone knows that the Abbé discovered and brought to light good evidence that man was already in existence during the Miocene period, for flints of undeniably human making were excavated from Miocene strata. In the words of the author of Modern Science and Modern Thought:
They must either have been chipped by man, or, as Mr. Boyd Dawkins supposes, by the dryopithecus or some other anthropoid ape which had a dose of intelligence so much superior to the gorilla or chimpanzee, as to be able to fabricate tools. But in this case the problem would be solved and the missing link discovered, for such an ape might well have been the ancestor of Palæolithic man.†
* Man’s Place in Nature, p. 159.
† Op. cit., p. 157.
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Or—the descendant of Eocene man, which is a variant offered to the theory. Meanwhile, the dryopithecus with such fine mental endowments is yet to be discovered. On the other hand, Neolithic and even Palæolithic man having become an absolute certainty, and as the same author justly observes:
If 100,000,000 years have elapsed since 676 ←the earth became sufficiently solidified to support vegetable and animal life, the Tertiary period may have lasted for 5,000,000; or for 10,000,000 years, if the life-sustaining order of things has lasted, as Lyell supposes for at least 200,000,000 years—*
why should not another theory be tried? Let us carry man, as a hypothesis, to the close of Mesozoic times—admitting argumenti causâ that the (much more recent) higher apes then existed! This would allow ample time for man and the modern apes to have diverged from the mythical “ape more anthropoid,” and even for the latter to have degenerated into those that are found mimicking man in using “branches of trees as clubs, and cracking cocoa-nuts with hammer and stones.”† Some savage tribes of hillmen in India build their abodes on trees, just as the gorillas build their dens. The question, which of the two, the beast or the man, has become the imitator of the other, is scarcely an open one, even granting Mr. Boyd Dawkins’ theory. The fanciful character of this hypothesis, is, however, generally admitted. It is argued that while in the Pliocene and Miocene periods there were true apes and baboons, and man was undeniably contemporaneous with the former of these times—though, as we see, orthodox Anthropology still hesitates, in the teeth of facts, to place him in the era of the dryopithecus, which latter—
Has been considered by some anatomists as in some respects superior to the chimpanzee or the gorilla—‡
yet, in the Eocene there have been no other fossil primates unearthed and no pithecoid stocks found save a few extinct lemurian forms. And we find it also hinted that the dryopithecus may have been the “missing link,” though the brain of the creature no more warrants the theory than does the brain of the modern gorilla. (See also Gaudry’s speculations.)
* Ibid., p. 161.
† This the way primitive man must have acted? We are not aware of men, not even of savages, in our age, who are known to have imitated the apes which lived side by side with them in the forests of America and the islands. But we do know of large apes who, tamed and living in houses, will mimic men to the length of donning hats and coats. The writer once had a chimpanzee who, without being taught, opened a newspaper and pretended to read it. It is the descending generations, the children, who mimic their parents—not the reverse.
‡ Ibid., p. 151.
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Now we would ask who among the Scientists is ready to prove that there was no man in existence in the early Tertiary period? What is it that prevented his presence? Hardly thirty years ago his existence any farther back than six or seven thousand years was indignantly denied. Now he is refused admission into the Eocene age. Next century it may become a question whether man was not contemporary with the “flying dragon,” the pterodactyl, the plesiosaurus and iguanodon, etc. Let us listen, however, to the echo of Science.
677 ← Now, wherever anthropoid apes lived it is clear that, whether as a question of anatomical structure, or of climate and surroundings, man, or some creature which was the ancestor of man, might have lived also. Anatomically speaking, apes and monkeys are as much special variations of the mammalian type as man, whom they resemble bone for bone, and muscle for muscle, and the physical animal man is simply an instance of the quadrumanous type specialized for erect posture and a larger brain* . . . If he could survive, as we know he did, the adverse conditions and extreme vicissitudes of the Glacial period, there is no reason why he might not have lived in the semi-tropical climate of the Miocene period, when a genial climate extended even to Greenland and Spitzbergen.†
When most of the men of Science who are uncompromising in their belief in the descent of man from an “extinct anthropoid mammal;” will not accept even the bare tenability of any other theory than an ancestor common to man and the dryopithecus, it is refreshing to find in a work of real scientific value such a margin for compromise. Indeed, it is as wide as it can be made under the circumstances, i.e., without immediate danger of getting knocked off one’s feet by the tidal wave of science-adulation. Believing that the difficulty of accounting—
For the development of intellect and morality by evolution is not so great as that presented by the difference as to physical structure‡ between man and the highest animal—
the same author says:
* It is asked, whether it would change one iota of the scientific truth and fact contained in the above sentence if it were to read: “the ape is simply an instance of the biped type specialized for going on all fours generally, and with a smaller brain.” Esoterically speaking, this is the real truth, and not the reverse.
† Modern Science and Modern Thought, pp. 151, 152.
‡ We cannot follow Mr. Laing here. When avowed Darwinists like Huxley point to “the great gulf which intervenes between the lowest ape and the highest man in intellectual power,” the “enormous gulf . . . between them,” the “immeasurable and practically infinite divergence of the human from the simian stirps” (Man’s Place in Nature, p. 102 and note); when even the physical basis of mind—the brain—so vastly exceeds in size that of the highest existing apes; when men like Wallace are forced to invoke the agency of extra-terrestrial intelligences in order to explain the rise of such a creature as the pithecanthropus alalus, or speechless savage of Hæckel, to the level of the large-brained and moral man of to-day—when all this is the case, it is idle to dismiss evolutionist puzzles so lightly. If the structural evidence is so unconvincing and, taken as a whole, so hostile to Darwinism, the difficulties as to the “how” of the evolution of the human mind by natural selection are tenfold greater.
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But it is not so easy to see how this difference of physical structure arose, and how a being came into existence which had such a brain and hand, and such undeveloped capabilities for an almost unlimited progress. The difficulty is this: the difference in structure between the lowest existing race of man and the highest existing ape is too great to admit of the possibility of one being the direct descendant of the other. The negro in some respects makes a slight approximation towards the Simian type. His skull is narrower, his brain less capacious, his muzzle more projecting, his arm longer than those of the 678 ←average European man. Still he is essentially a man, and separated by a wide gulf from the chimpanzee or the gorilla. Even the idiot or crétin, whose brain is no larger and intelligence no greater than that of the chimpanzee, is an arrested man, not an ape.
If, therefore, the Darwinian theory holds good in the case of man and ape, we must go back to some common ancestor from whom both may have originated. . . . But to establish this as a fact and not a theory we require to find that ancestral form, or, at any rate, some intermediate forms tending towards it . . . in other words . . . the “missing link.” Now it must be admitted that, hitherto, not only have no such missing links been discovered, but the oldest known human skulls and skeletons which date from the Glacial period, and are probably at least 100,000 years old, show no very decided approximation towards any such pre-human type. On the contrary, one of the oldest types, that of the men of the sepulchral cave of Cro-Magnon,* is that of a fine race, tall in stature, large in brain, and on the whole superior to many of the existing races of mankind. The reply of course is that the time is insufficient, and if man and the ape had a common ancestor, that as a highly developed anthropoid ape, certainly, and man, probably, already existed in the Miocene period, such ancestor must be sought still further back at a distance compared with which the whole Quaternary period sinks into insignificance. . . . All this is true, and it may well make us hesitate before we admit that man . . . is alone an exception to the general law of the universe, and is the creature of a special creation. This is the more difficult to believe, as the ape family which man so closely resembles [?] in physical structure contains numerous branches which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series. If a special creation is required for man, must there not have been special creations for the chimpanzee, the gorilla, the orang, and for at least 100 different species of apes and monkeys which are all built on the same lines?†
There was a “special creation” for man, and a “special creation” for the ape, his progeny; only on other lines than ever bargained for by Science. Albert Gaudry and others give some weighty reasons why man cannot be regarded as the crown of an ape-stock. When one finds that not only was the “primeval savage” (?) a reality in the Miocene times, but that, as de Mortillet shows, the flint relics he has
* A race which MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy regard as a branch of the same stock whence the Canary Island Guanches sprung—offshoots of the Atlanteans, in short.
† Ibid., pp. 180-182.
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left behind him were splintered by fire in that remote epoch; when we learn that the dryopithecus, alone of the anthropoids, appears in those strata, what is the natural inference? That the Darwinians are in a quandary. The very man-like gibbon is still in the same low grade of development, as it was when it coëxisted with man at the close of the Glacial period. It has not appreciably altered since the Pliocene times. Now there is little to choose between the dryopithecus and the existing anthropoids—gibbon, gorilla, etc. If, then, the Darwinian theory is all-sufficient, how are we to “explain” the evolution of this 679 ←ape into man during the first half of the Miocene? The time is far too short for such a theoretical transformation. The extreme slowness with which variation in species supervenes renders the thing inconceivable—more especially on the “natural selection” hypothesis. The enormous mental and structural gulf between a savage acquainted with fire and the mode of kindling it, and a brutal anthropoid, is too great to bridge even in idea, during so contracted a period. Let the Evolutionists push back the process into the preceding Eocene, if they prefer to do so; let them even trace both man and dryopithecus to a common ancestor; the unpleasant consideration has, nevertheless, to be faced that in Eocene strata the anthropoid fossils are as conspicuous by their absence, as is the fabulous pithecanthropus of Hæckel. Is an exit out of this cul de sac to be found by an appeal to the “unknown,” and a reference, with Darwin, to the “imperfection of the geological record”? So be it; but the same right of appeal must then be equally accorded to the Occultists, instead of remaining the monopoly of puzzled Materialism. Physical man, we say, existed before the first bed of the Cretaceous rocks was deposited. In the early part of the Tertiary age, the most brilliant civilization the world has ever known flourished at a period when the Hæckelian man-ape is conceived as roaming through primeval forests, and Mr. Grant Allen’s putative ancestor as swinging himself from bough to bough with his hairy mates, the degenerated Liliths of the Third Race Adam. Yet there were no anthropoid apes in the brighter days of the civilization of the Fourth Race; but Karma is a mysterious law, and no respecter of persons. The monsters bred in sin and shame by the Atlantean Giants, “blurred copies” of their bestial sires, and hence of modern man, according to Huxley, now mislead and overwhelm with error the speculative Anthropologist of European Science.
Where did the first men live? Some Darwinists say in Western
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Africa, some in Southern Asia, others again believe in an independent origin of human stocks in Asia and America from a simian ancestry. Hæckel, however, advances gaily to the charge. Starting from his prosimia, “the ancestor common to all other catarrhini including man”—a “link” now, however, disposed of for good by recent anatomical discoveries—he endeavours to find a habitat for the primeval pithecanthropus alalus.
In all probability it [the transformation of animal into man] occurred in Southern Asia, in which region many evidences are forthcoming that here was the original home of the different species of man. Probably Southern Asia itself was not the earliest cradle of the human race, but Lemuria, a continent that lay to the south of Asia, and sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. 680 ←The period during which the evolution of the anthropoid apes into ape-like men took place was probably the last part of the Tertiary period, the Pliocene age, and perhaps the Miocene age, its forerunner.*
Of the above speculations, the only one of any worth is that referring to Lemuria, which was the cradle of mankind—of the physical sexual creature who materialized through long æons out of the ethereal hermaphrodites. Only, if it is proved that Easter Island is an actual relic of Lemuria, we must believe that according to Hæckel the “dumb ape-men,” just removed from a brutal mammalian monster, built the gigantic portrait-statues, two of which are now in the British Museum. Critics are mistaken in terming Hæckelian doctrines “abominable, revolutionary, immoral”—though Materialism is the legitimate outcome of the ape-ancestor myth—they are simply too absurd to demand disproof.
* Pedigree of Man, p. 73.