Page:Creation by Evolution (1928).djvu/326

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CREATION BY EVOLUTION

yet persist. In Europe they had a similar history except that they reappear from some Asiatic or African fastness, flourish for a while, and die out again until the coming of Man. The monkeys of Gibraltar are really African, despite their foothold in this outlying rock.

Living monkeys, both tailed and man-like, are found to-day in both Africa and Asia, and although all are derived from the same root as mankind, the great or man-like apes, especially the gorilla and chimpanzee, are our next of kin, being separable from man, aside from spiritual values, by what in other creatures would be considered inconsequential details. It is only our lack of perspective that makes us imagine a considerable gulf between us.

Human and simian relationships are not yet clearly traceable; they are inferred from close structural and functional similarities, the distinctions being referable to differences of habit and habitat. That man and the great apes are cousinly descendants from a common stock all scientists believe; they do not believe, as some imagine, that man is an exalted ape or that the ape is a degenerate man, though what one should call the common progenitor, if not an ape-like form, I do not know. This precursor of ours has been long sought, and he has been called the "missing link," as though one link could constitute a chain covering many thousands of years of descent. Pithecanthropus, the form found by Dr. Dubois in Trinil, Java, in 1891-92, stands not far from the ancestral form and more than any known today deserves this title. This type, which existed half a million years ago, was then already erect, though not perhaps of god-like carriage, showing how remote was the attainment of this human characteristic; but in form and capacity of skull he lies about midway between the gorilla and the Neanderthal type of man that lived in Europe some 25,000 to 40,000 years ago. In that

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