Ape-Men and Prigs

Modern man, the only living species of a once numerous human family, is as definitely pigeonholed in the animal world by taxonomists (biological classifiers) as is Sylvilagus floridanus, the cottontail rabbit. The gun-shooting, crystal-gazing, ballot-casting species--called Homo sapiens by taxonomic courtesy--belongs to the genus homo, the family of Hominidae, the order of primates, the class of mammals, the subphylum of vertebrates, the phylum of Chordata, and to the animal kingdom.

But taxonomy is always arbitrary because species, genera and families tend to merge into one another. So many "missing links" have been found by paleontologists that an exact dividing line between humans and apes is almost nonexistent. Pithecanthropus erectus, the Javanese oldster regarded by most authorities as a very apish man, is called an apeman. In the past two years Dr. Robert Broom of Pretoria's Transvaal Museum has found in South Africa the fossil remains of two very manlike apes which have been called man-apes.

After some uncertainty over nomenclature, Dr. Broom has settled on the exciting names Plesianthropus ("Near-Man") and Paranthropus ("Beside-Man") for his finds. Their brain capacities were small, 600 and 440 cc. as against about 1,400 cc. for modern man. But when Dr. Broom had had a good look at their teeth he sent excited reports to the British journal Nature claiming that these old creatures must be assigned a place very close to the point of human divergence from the parent primate stock.

In some conservative anthropological quarters it was feared that Dr. Broom might be a trifle overenthusiastic. Dr. Broom, however, invited Dr. William King Gregory to come over to South Africa, examine his skulls, express any opinion he liked. Dr. Gregory (of Columbia University, Manhattan's American Museum) is a top-notch paleontologist who knows as much about the evolution of primate teeth as anyone alive. He went, looked. By last week he was back and perfectly willing to add his opinion that the Broom finds are of "exceptional importance."

In the teeth of Plesianthropus and Paranthropus, Dr. Gregory found an extraordinary mixture of human and apelike features. The general pattern seemed closely related to the dentition of Dryopithecus, a celebrated extinct ape. Most anthropologists believe man descended from a generalized type of Dryopithecus.

In the South African teeth, Dr. Gregory also found connections with Peking Man, the orangutan, and Sivapithecus, a manlike fossil ape discovered many years ago in India. The geological character of the ground, however, indicated that Dr. Broom's creatures lived relatively late in the Glacial Age, by which time definitely human types such as Peking Man, Piltdown Man and Heidelberg Man had already appeared. Plesianthropus and Paranthropus thus appeared as laggard survivors of a much earlier evolutionary spurt--"conservative cousins of man," says Dr. Gregory, "and progressive cousins of the modern apes."

Summing up in Science, Dr. Gregory noted that the idea of a comparatively recent divergence of man from the anthropoid stem is generally repugnant to "that self-conscious and conceited prig who calls himself Homo sapiens and is fond of acting like the viceroy of God." He points out that some scientists who ought to know better keep toying with the idea that, during the general evolution of the vertebrates, a sort of separate channel was set aside for the line which was eventually to flower in man.

"The small-brained . . . man-apes of South Africa," observed Dr. Gregory, "now add their mute testimony that man, like his less ambitious cousins, the modern anthropoid apes, is a descendant of the late Tertiary dryopethicine ape stock of Europe, Asia, and Africa." In Dr. Gregory's opinion, indubitable apes evolved into indubitable humans during a profound structural upheaval compassed within the past ten or twelve million years.

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