The descent of man / Wilhelm Boelsche.

  • Bölsche, Wilhelm, 1861-1939.
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The descent of man / Wilhelm Boelsche. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    • ■ ■■■ 'о ■ . • 'л ■■- ■•■■>• 20 THE DESCENT OF MAN on earth: the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-utan and the gibbon, all again divided into several individual varieties. (After the recent entirely revised zoological |pomenclature the Latin names in consecutive order are: gorilla, pan, pongo and hylobates. ) To the first observers the Trinil skull seemed most to resemble the skull of the present day gibbon ; it remind¬ ed later observers of the chimpanzee. At all events, certain experts decided with certainty, only, that the skull must have belonged to a large man-ape of pre-historic times. This, however, did not make everything clear. The cran¬ ium, as far as it was preserved was filled with plaster and a mould taken to determine how much space the brain had occupied. A figure was in this way found which approximately took the exact middle between a gorilla and the lowest Austra¬ lian. In other words it was far greater than the capacity of the monkey, without at the same time equalling man's, either in the sense of to-day or even of the glacial epoch. What sort of a creature had presented itself? The scien¬ tists formed parties. A very ape-like man, said the one. A very man-like ape, said the others. The discoverer, Dubois, himself chose the middle road: he baptised his creature with the double-name Pithecanthropus, that is in English: the ape-man. For the current of our thoughts this swaying of opinions must be of most instructive value. We experience as an estab¬ lished fact that until the close of the tertiary period, there lived, at least in Java, creatures which, taking nearly the middle- position, were half man, half man-ape. Their skull, exaggerat¬ ing those special characteristics which distinguished the Nean¬ derthal-man from living man, approached at the same time a new stage for which we have a long-established picture: the monkey. .With this our search has actually been given a first aim, an aim at the first disguise in which, working backwards upon circumstantial evidence, we re-discover and unmask man beyond the border, where he might have begun to retire entirely from the human type of to-day. Is it not possible that at a certain historical stage man might simply resolve himself into — the monkey? At this point again another, quite venerable old train of thoughts of the most severe natural research comes to our assistance.