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Part Three

In the thirty-five years following the discovery of the 1890

bones of Pithecanthropus the discipline of paleoanthro­
pology grew into a mature program of research marked by to
an increase in discoveries of fossil hominid specimens, 1925
the development of new techniques for analyzing the
fossils, the establishment of research centers for human
paleontology, the teaching of university courses on this
subject, the formulation of new theories to interpret the
fossil record, and an increasing awareness among scholars
that the discipline of genetics could shed light on the
problems of the origin of man and his history. A major
feature in this coming of age of paleoanthropology was not
only the discovery of fossil hominids in deposits beyond
the borders of Europe, but also the realization that the
European, Asiatic, and African fossil specimens now
known were of varieties that could not be classified within
the narrow dichotomy of the Neanderthal or Cro- Magnan
types.
The realization that ancient man might be discovered in
Africa, Asia, and Australia was initiated by Dubois's
discovery in 1890-91. From a fluvial deposit at Trinil in
Java Dubois recovered a skullcap and long bones of
a hominid that could not be matched by any specimen
in the European fossil record at that time. At the meeting of
the Royal Dublin Society in 1895 the discoverer stressed
that his Pithecanthropus erectus occupied a phylogenetic
position between the anthropoid and human stems, as
Haeckel had conceived of his hypothetical Pithecan­
thropus. Immediately differences of interpretation arose
over the question of whether this specimen was an ape,
a transitional ape-man form, a Homo sapiens, or at least a 189
190 Part Three / 1890 to 1925
Part Three / 1890 to 1925 191
creature more closely akin to man than to the anthropoids. Had Dubois not
been offended by his colleagues' speculations and by the hesitancy with
which his fossil man was received by some of them, he might have brought
forth additional specimens which he had discovered in Southeast Asia.
Instead he did not reveal the mandibular fragment from Kedung Brubus
until 1924, although it had been found twenty-six years earlier, and the
four femora that he had recovered from the Trinil beds in 1900 did not
come to scientific attention until 1932. The bones from Wadjak, also in
Java, were resurrected in 1921 through the intercession of the American
anthropologist, Ales Hrdlicka.
That early man had a wider range of phenotypic variation than could be
represented by the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon types of fossils found in
Europe was supported by new evidence from Asia, Africa, and Australia,
and especially by the discovery of the Heidelberg mandible from Germany.
The type of hominid represented by Pithecanthropus had not been found
outside the island of Java during this period of paleoanthropological
research. But the morphological affinities of the European Neanderthal
specimens with the Broken Hill fossil from Northern Rhodesia suggested
that here was a fossil form with a wider geographical distribution. It
is curious to note that during this period when the fossil record for Europe
was being considerably amplified, morphological variation for the Nean­
derthal specimens was hardly admitted, whereas for the later Cro- Magnon
fossils the paleoanthropologists were eager to isolate sub-types and
racial entities on the basis of individual specimens. Of the Neanderthal
specimens from La Ferrassie, Le Moustier, La Quina, and La Chapel le­
aux-Saintes it was the complete male specimen from La Chapelle-aux­
Saintes that was set up by Boule as the prototype of Neanderthal Man.
The other Neanderthal specimens were better or worse examples of this
type of ancient humanity in accordance with the degree of their resemblance
to this ideal form. Among the Cro- Magnon specimens thus far discovered,
Verneau claimed the male and female burial at the Grotte des Enfants as
indicative of a negroid racial element in this population, just as the specimen
from Combe Capelle was accorded a sub-specific classification by Klaatsch.
With the eskimoid specimen from Chancelade and the Cro- Magnon
specimen proper, the Upper Paleolithic hominids of Europe became divided
further into racial sub-types while the Neanderthals tended to be lumped
into a single phenotype.
While the discovery of Pithecanthropus provided paleoanthropologists
with a hominid fossil that seemed similar in some of its physical features
to the anthropoid apes, it was recognized nevertheless as being a hominid
very different from Haeckel's Pithecanthropus alalus, that medley of simian
and human physical conditions. Scientists continued to be embarrassed
for the lack of a convincing missing link. Then, among the discoveries of
this period, came a series of remarkable finds from Piltdown and Sheffield
Park in Sussex between 1908 and 1915. Here was a fossil to jar the anti-
T
evolutionists out of their complacency and scepticism about the possibility
of discovering missing links. Piltdown Man, or Eoanthropus dawsoni,
sported a modern-like skullcap and a simian mandible. Was he not the true
representative of that transitional form between man and ape? This happy
discovery seemed at first to answer many of the needs of those paleoan­
thropologists harassed by embarassing questions. It was remarkable that
the different anatomical portions of this fossil turned up in deposits at
Piltdown and Sheffield Park in an order that paralleled chronologically the
succession of questions asked about the specimen by interested scholars.
In the light of our present knowledge that Piltdown was a fraud, it has been
suggested that the hoax was a sincere attempt on the part of its manu­
facturer to hasten the day when human evolution could no longer be a
matter of doubt. Interestingly, the Eoanthropus specimen had outlived its
service some quarter of a century before its fraudulency was ascertained,
and the fossil was frequently described in the textbooks and scientific
papers of the early twenties of this century as an aberrant type of hominid
whose very nature precluded its serious consideration in the construction
of man's phylogenetic tree.
How were the differences in the physical type of early man and the
great geographical dispersions of some of these types to be explained in
terms of human phylogeny? To answer this question the early twentieth
century paleoanthropologists needed to know two things: the relative ages
of the specimens that they considered the prototypes of the different kinds
of early men, and the loci of human evolution from whence these types
began their adaptive radiation.
The dating by geological stratification and faunal association of the
deposits at Trinil and Heidelberg demonstrated that the antiquity of man
could be extended as far back as the Mid- Pleistocene. Dubois's dating
of the Pithecanthropus bones to the Early Pleistocene or Pliocene was
rejected by the members of the Selenka expedition who visited Trinil in
1906, but reports from other regions of discoveries of Tertiary Man were
still current. However, during this period the claims for Tertiary Man were
not as enthusiastically received as they had been in the earlier part of the
second half of the nineteenth century. Ameghino's assertions of a South
American origin for man, which were based on his studies of osteological
series of New World monkeys, were appreciated only by a limited number
of scholars in Europe. By 1927 the revelation that a supposed early
American hominid progenitor, Hesperopithecus haroldcooh was nothing
but the tooth of an extinct peccary did much to undermine the prestige of
claims for the fossils of Tertiary Man, especially in the New World. Support
for this notion was stronger in the field of prehistoric archaeology, where it
was asserted that pre- Paleolithic tools called "eo\iths" were to be found in
Tertiary deposits in western Europe and India. The eolithic controversy
of the 1890s had no sooner subsided when Moir revived interest in the
so-called rostrocariante tools from the Pliocene beds of East Anglia. The
 T
192 Part Three / 1890 to 1925
eolithic and rostrocarinate controversies became less intense when it
was realized that such "tools" could be produced by natural agents,
for example water activity working with an abrasive agent on stones. It
came to be recognized that eoliths were not confined to Tertiary deposits,
that they were found in obvious pre-hominid deposits, and that they were
never found in regions where the materials of which they were composed
were not already present.
The venerable idea that man had originated somewhere in Asia now
seemed confirmed by the discovery of Pithecanthropus. This thesis found
further support when in the Siwalik Hills of northern India the fossils of
Miocene and Pliocene apes were uncovered by Pilgrim. Some of these
fossils were immediately recognized as possessing morphological features
similar to those represented in the hominid stem, various scholars favoring
one fossil anthropoid over another as nearest to man. Although fossil
anthropoids from the Tertiary were being found in Egypt at this time, the
idea that Africa might be the birthplace of man, as Darwin had earlier
suggested, was overshadowed by opinions that favored Asia as the place
of human beginnings, as seen in the writings of Richard Swan Lull.
During this period the major theories of human phylogeny became
defined. Many interpretations of the fossil human record appearing before
1925 persisted to the present, but with some striking modifications. Some
tenets that once seemed unassailable have had to be abandoned. Thus
while the thesis of a catarrhine origin for the human stem was not entirely
rejected, the discovery of fossil primates from India and Egypt lent much
support to the hypothesis of a pongid ancestry for man. Gregory was at
this time the recognized American authority on the comparative anatomy
of the higher primates. On the basis of similarities of dental form between
the fossil apes and the fossil men then known he championed Dryopitheeus
as nearest to the human stem. Pilgrim also accepted an ape ancestry for
man, and he saw osteological and dental features in the fossil ape Sivapith­
eeus that led him to hail it as the Miocene progenitor. Indeed, he placed
Sivapithecus in the family Hominidae with man, the other large anthropoids
falling under the family Simiidae. In reaction to these concepts of an
anthropoid human ancestor, several anatomists argued that the human
line had its origins in primate forms much lower on the taxonomic scale.
Thus Wood-Jones suggested that the distinctively human line originated at
the beginning of the Tertiary without ever having been directly connected
with the anthropoid stem. Rather, man had evolved from a tarsioid stock
whose only living representative today is the small arboreal Tarsius of
Madagascar. Wood-Jones admitted that no fossil form of such a human
ancestor was yet known, but he based his thesis on data from comparative
anatomy and embryology. Tate Regan, on the other hand, placed Tarsius
and Homo at the ends of two lines that began to diverge in Cretaceous
times. Others students of primate phylogency asserted that the nonhuman
progenitor of man was to be found in the lemuroid line or among the
...I.
193
Part Three /1890 to 1925
platyrrhines of South America, theories that never found the same degree
of acceptance that was accorded the anthropoid ape and tarsioid hypoth­
eses. The writings of Boule kept alive the notion that man's closest
relatives in the phylogenetic tree were to be sought among the catarrhines.
Finally, there is the bizarre notion of the German prehistorian Hermann
Klaatsch, who believed that the human species is older than either the
anthropoid or the infra-anthropoid lines, the apes being degenerate forms
of humanity. Klaatsch maintained that the human stem arose from a now
extinct being which was already human rather than simian, and that after
it had reached the evolutionary stage represented by Pithecanthropus
it ramified into various primate forms which continued to evolve as the
living races of man as well as the living kinds of great apes. Klaatsch
reflected certain eighteenth century ideas that apes were degenerate
forms of humanity, founding his interpretation on the premise that the
human body is more primitive in its structure than that of any of the apes,
the latter being specialized deviants pointing in a direction of evolution
different from that of the more generalized catarrhine and human stocks.
Klaatsch was the chief representative of the Polyphyletic School during
this period.
By the early years of the present century the fossil hominid record had
been amplified to such a degree that it was being asked if Homo sapiens
could be descended from all of the earlier men of the Pleistocene thus far
discovered, or was our species descended from some or perhaps from
none of these fossils, arising as still another line whose members might yet
be undiscovered? If Homo sapiens could be shown to have followed a
separate evolutionary line, the antiquity of this line could be determined
independently of the estimates of the antiquity of the lines for Pithecan­
thropus, Neanderthal, and related fossil hominid forms. During this period
there appeared to be some evidence that Homo sapiens was more ancient
than formerly supposed on the basis of putative Homo sapiens fossil speci­
mens from sites that could be dated as earlier than Upper Pleistocene.
Eoanthropus had already been interpreted as a hominid of great antiquity;
its Homo sapiens type of cranium was the principle evidence for this
decision. Furthermore there was the hesitancy to admit the implications of
what man's brute ancestry might have been, an intellectual inhibition that
was no less foreign to the sensitivities of dedicated paleoanthropologists
of this period than it was to their non-scientifically oriented contemporaries.
A separate human line afforded that psychological buffer to the human
ego which still found it distasteful to admit the meanness of man's origins.
But the presence of certain sapiens-like hominid fossils in geological
deposits then described as Second Interglacial or earlier was the most
significant factor in the query as to whether Homo sapiens might not have
evolved earlier than the followers of the Unilinear School had supposed.
If the sapiens line was separate from that which included the Neanderthal
and Pithecanthropus forms, then these more primitive homin ids could be
 Part Three / 1WIO to 1925 ~
I
Dubois / Place of Pithecanthropus in the Genealogic;d Tree
195

related only indirectly to modern man. Theirs were phylogenetic lines that than it was the home of man's biological progenitors. If only a portion of
withered, while the sapiens line flourished and survived. Sir Arthur Keith the prehistoric cultural patterns of the Old World were within the European
was the leading voice in support of this "Presapiens School" and the first area, then hominid progenitors might also be forthcoming from Africa
to draw up a phylogenetic tree to represent the branching off of the Homo and Asia. Yet in 1924 when the first Austra/opithecus was discovered,
sapiens from those stems leading to other fossil hominids. Keith differs in his very few scientists were aware of its significant role in future interpretations
early works from later adherents of the Presapiens School, for he did not set of the story of human evolution.
apart particular fossil specimens as representative of direct human ances­
tors of modern man. Also he relegated Eoanthropus, in spite of its Homo
sapiens skullcap, to a separate evolutionary stem that had become extinct.
The Presapiens School arose in part because of the dissatisfaction of
many early twentieth century scholars with the tenets of the Polyphyletic
and Unilinear Schools which had been inherited by the discipline from
the writings of the previous century. Nor was the Presapiens School the
only result of this need to assess the data in a new way in the light of the The Place of Pithecanthropus in the
current amplification of the hominid fossil record. The Unilinear School Genealogical Tree
has sometimes been called the Neanderthal School because of its tenet
that the Neanderthal specimens marked a necessary link in the evolutionary
Marie Eugene Francois Thomas Dubois
sequence of types that led to Homo sapiens. This Neanderthalism, or
pan-Neanderthal theory, was favored by Dubois, who placed between his 1896
Pithecanthropus and modern man the Neanderthal specimens then
known. Grafton Elliot Smith agreed that Homo sapiens shows a number In the report on the scit'ntific meet­ the accompa nying diagram, repre­
of neanderthaloid traits and that our species of the Late Pleistocene ing of the Royal Dublin Socit'ty sellting the t'volution of the Old
followed in time the European Neanderthals. But Smith differed from his on November 20, in Nature of \Vodd apes frOln a hypothrtic;ll com­
colleagues in the Unilinear School by his interpretation of the popular December ;), 189:1, it is statrd that mon ancestor, whom I call Procer­
belief that while all living races today are members of the same genus and I placed Pithecanthropus in the copithecus.
species, certain races are more primitive than others. Smith saw these genealogical tree, drawn by Prof. I n Prof. Cunningham"s tree,
primitive groups as the less evolved representatives of the Homo sapiens Cunningham, below the point of figured in Nature of December 5, p.
branch that departed from the main human stem at a period in the divarication of the Anthropoid apes 116, he rt'gards the left branch as all
Plesistocene prior to the continuation of the Neanderthals into their blind from the human line. This indeed 1 human, the right one as entirely
alley of evolution, marked by the "classic" or extremely robust Neanderthals did. But this statement could be simian, and he placed Pithecanthro­
found in western Europe and in the Broken Hill site of Northern Rhodesia. misleading as to my real views on pus midway betwern recent ~lan
Nor did Smith accept Pithecanthropus as the ancestor of Neanderthal the grnealogy of Pithecanthropus, and the point of divarication. Now
Man. This Javanese fossil appeared to him too specialized to be on that such as I stated thrIll already on p. 1 could find no place for the fossil
main human stem leading from the Miocene apes up to the "Nordic 38 of Illy original memoir ("J'ithe­ Jayanese form, which I consider as
racial group" of modern man. It was primarily Smith's thesis that Homo canthrof!uS erect liS, Eine TIIenschen­ intermediate between ~Ian and An­
sapiens became divorced from the Neanderthals and evolved separately at ahnliche Cebt'rgansform aus Java," thropoid apt's, many of the branches
some period of the Third Interglacial that became the basic premise of the Batavia, lWH), and more fully at the of that tree. only in the third chirf
"Pre neanderthal SchooL" The supporters of this theory differ from the last mt'eting of the Anthropological
lint', tht' main stem, \Try nt'ar to tht'
Presapiens adherents mainly by placing the origin of the Homo sapiens Institute of Creat Britain and Ire­ point of diyaricatioll.

line later in time-namely, within the period of the Third Interglacial­ land, on Novembn 2J. Owing to tht' same eircums(;lnces,
than do their colleagues, who would place this time of species formation It Illay not be superfluous to which indirectly prevented me from
at the Second Interglacial or earlier. explain my views here by means of explaining my own yiews on the
By the first quarter of the present century these four ways of interpreting
the fossil record had been defined. The results of prehistoric researches "The Place of 'l'ithecanthrofJUs' in the Genealogical Tree" Nature. Vol. 5:;,
suggested that Europe could not be the cradle of human culture any more pp. 245-47. 1896.