EVOLUTION OF MANKIND

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 67, 20 March 1937, Page 27

EVOLUTION OF MANKIND

"Key Ape," the comparative anatomists call the gibbon. He stands about three feel high.,weighs twelve pounds, lives on fruit, leaps distances of forty feet from branch to branch with the ease that becomes the supreme acrobat of the jungle. He is a "key" because he may unlock the mystery of man's origin, says a writer in an overseas paper. Darwin's conclusion that man is descended from an Old World ape still holds good. But the descent was not as direct as Darwin supposed. Seventy years of study have convinced paleontologists and comparative anatomists that anthropoids and men sprang from a 'common, extinct ancestor. What manner of creature this was, it is impossible to determine. No fossil bones have been dug up to indicate his form and bearing. Yet something about him can be deducted from the anthropoids of today. And of all anthropoids the gibbon holds the key position. He is the most two-legged of all apes. Here we have the scientific reason for the important Asiatic Primate Expedition which has been organised by Harvard University, Bard College, and Johns Hopkins. Apes and monkeys are to bo studied in their native jungles by a group of qualified specialists. The gibbons. live in great clans in the jungles of Siam. Sub-human-them-selves, they have a sub-human society. How is that society organised? There

must be an instinctive code of living. What is it? Groups are formed that lead a crude community life. How are they co-ordinated? What part do 1 symbols, chattering, scream;;, shrieks, fand grunts play in this co-ordination? The questions can be answered for some apes, but not for the gibbon and other Asiatic anthropoids. If these stand closer to the extinct common ancestor of men and apes, social studies are as important as anatomical comparisons. Westermarck, one of the leading anthropologists of our time, holds that marriage is an inheritance from some primitive ancestor. Maybe the gibbon can throw light on this point. He is a monogamist. But is he given to divorce for the sake of some attractive co-respondent? It sounds silly. Yet marriage and divorce must have begun somewhere; sometime in man's evolution. Why stop at the gibbon? The expedition won't. There are other apes and monkeys which are not so high in the scale, but which must be studied in establishing relationships. Langurs and macaques, for example. And behind these, in a Darwinian sense, stands the tupia, an insect eater of Borneo which bridges the gap between the primates (men and apes) and the out-and-out quadrupeds. All will be surveyed and their characteristics catalogued in an effort to trace man's family tree with new surcness.