MAN'S AFFINITY TO THE APE

Evening Star, Issue 21711, 4 May 1934, Page 12

MAN'S AFFINITY TO THE APE

PROFESSOR E. SMITH ON HUMAN BIOLOGY Delivering the first of a series of three lectures on human biology at the Royal Institution, London, Professor Elliot Smith said the term “ human biology ’’had been applied to that particular field of investigation \vhich was aptly labelled in 1§62 by T. H. Huxley, ‘ Man’s ' Place in Nature.’ This label was conceived amid the turmoil of the historic controversy that followed the publication of Charles Darwin’s ‘ Origin of Species.’ The study of mankind as a branch of biology involved the examination of-' a vast field of anatomical and physiological evidence. Fortunately, he said, he was relieved from this task, for two of his friends had done it for _ him.- In his boolf ‘Functional Affinities of Man. Monkeys, and Apes.' published last month, Dr S. Zukerman had reviewed the subject with’great clearness and insight, and had introduced a novel element into the discussion by considering the physiological evidences of man’s affinity to the ape. thus establishing on a surer footing the fact of man’s simian ancestry. A brilliant account of the-anatomical evidence—‘ Man’s Early Ancestors ’ —in support of this conclusion, by professor Le Gros Clark, was to be published this month. . With these orderly statements ol evidence and argument at our service there could no longer be any doubt of man’s ancestry. He was certainly sprung from a group of apes which many millions of years ago split into two series, one from which the chimpanzees and gorillas were derived, and the other from which man’s ancestors sprang. Both events in all probability occurred in Africa. The study of the evidence upon which these inferences were based provided a fuller understanding of the nature and potentialities of man and human nature. The fact of the common origin of man arid the apes was revealed in the amazing identities of structure, so that it was a simple statement of easily demonstrable fact to call man a big-brained ape—a phrase that still aroused 'as intense emotions of resentment as did Huxley’s so-called blasphemous lectures more than seventy years ago. It was none the less the duty of men of science to state facts plainly and unequivocally. The outstanding distinctive character of man was his muscular skilly which found expression in the acquisition of- speech. We could infer from the casts of the brain cases of Peking Man, Pithecanthropus, _ and Piltdown Man that speech came into being during the transformation of ape into man. The possession of speech enabled men to accumulate knowledge and traditional ways of thought and action, and brought them more and more under the domination of customary rules of conduct and opinion; for it was easier to borrow than invent, to copy than to think. Thus mankind became bound together by the slavery of imitation. ,