Orang-utan cousins?

Press, 30 April 1988, Page 24

Orang-utan cousins?

The Rod Ape. By Jeffery Schwartz. Elm > Tree Books, ,1987. 315 pp. Illustrations. $39.95.

(Reviewed by Ralf Unger)

The search for the missing link — a common ape ancestor to the modern apes and man — has been a long-time fascinating study emphasised by Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Dr

Schwartz is an enthusiastic young

anthropologist who is confronting

some commonly held views, arguing in a persuasive but very complex way that it is not the African (apes and particularly the friendly, playful chimpanzee that are most closely related to Man, but the orang-utan that has the most common features with us. ) | The most popularised human paleontologist, Louis Leaked, concentrated on the, three great apes. Three women — Jane Goodall tjie best known —. each took a separate area of I study of chimpanzees. Mountain Gorillas, and the Orangutans. Because of Goodall’s ability Ito generate I public interest, the humanness of the chimpanzee was constantly j emphasised. The huge orang-utari, with his ability to kill) a crocodile by pulling open its jaws and ripping up its throat, and its lowbrowed smouldering somewhat insane appearance, was not happily accepted as our second cousin. Schwartz considers descriptions of courting I procedures and family relationships. Tiny fossil bones are carefully measured and with smaller characteristics more emphasised than by his colleagues -4- lines on molars, shapes of passages between the oral and nasal cavities; and minor bones in the) knuckles of hands — Schwartz describes himself las being like a "detective on the Evolutionary Poljce Force assigned |to the Speqial Phylogenetic Reconstruction Squad. Your job |is to try to figure out he mysterious links between ; the members lof the genus and species gang." i . I | With such enthusiasm, if his theory is further validated, we will have to fit the scenarios of human origin based on a chimpanzee model into the back stockroom and look the orang-utan straight in the eye and say, "G’tiay cuzzy," but please not hug or shake hands. 3l |