Abstract
THE EVOLUTION or MAN AND APES.—In volume I. of the new journal Palceobiologica, edited by Prof. Othenio Abel and published in Vienna and Leipzig (Emil Haim and Co.), there appears a paper by Prof. H. F. Osborn entitled “Recent Discoveries relating to the Origin and Antiquity of Man.” This paper is less a review of recent discovery than a statement of Prof. Osborn's own opinion on the course that the evolution of man has taken. This differs from that usually held by the majority of investigators, in that it denies any close connexion between ape and man and places the ancestor common to the two stocks back to a period so remote as the Oligocene. While admitting that there are some anatomical resemblances, Prof. Osborn lays more stress on the difference in ‘behaviourism’ between man and the ape, and thinks that “scientific mythology has accumulated around the anthropoid apes, falsifying and exaggerating their human resemblances, minimising and ignoring their profound differences from man in habit and gait and in the anatomy and functions of the brain. …” Some resemblances, moreover, are to be attributed to convergence. There are two diagrams, both dated 1927, which express graphically Prof. Osborn's views on primate evolution. Propliopithecus at the base of the Oligocene is the common meeting ground of the two stocks. Dryopithecus and Pliopithecus are Miocene representatives of the Simian division, but with the exception of Hesperopithecus, on whose primate nature very great doubt has been cast (v. NATURE, Jan. 28, p. 148), there is no human representative actually known until towards the top of the Pliocene. This emphasises how much palaeontological exploration has yet to do before there is enough evidence to form a clear opinion on this great problem of our own ancestry.
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Research Items. Nature 121, 336–338 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/121336a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/121336a0