Near-Men & Apes

A missing link got demoted at last week's London meeting of the International Congress of Zoology. The chimp-size fossil primate Proconsul africanus, which lived in east Africa 30 million years ago, had been described as sitting in the family tree of both ape and man. Its skull, though primitive, is not conclusively apelike, so there seemed to be a good possibility that its descendants could be humans or apes or both.

The recently found bones of Proconsul's forearm and hand spoiled this theory. According to Anatomists John Napier and Peter Davis of the University of London, they clearly belonged to a brachiator, a creature that swung by its hands from bough to bough. So Proconsul must have been an ape, perhaps an ancestor of modern apes but not of non-brachiating man. The true missing link is still to be found.

Another long-established notion got its comeuppance at the same congress. Dr. A. J. E. Cave of London's St. Bartholomew's Hospital told the zoologists that the stooping, bent-kneed, apelike stance of Neanderthal man was a libelous misconstruction. About 1911, said Dr. Cave, French Paleontologist Pierre Marcelin Boule fitted together a Neanderthal skeleton found in France. He did not allow for the fact that the bones belonged to an old Neanderthaler who suffered from arthritis. Recently Dr. Cave himself examined those same bones. With age and arthritis properly allowed for, the Neanderthaler looked better. His face may have been brutish, and his body a trifle too hairy for modern tastes, but he probably walked like modern men and stood as straight.

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