Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, February 1899: Volume LIV, No. 4, February 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, February 1899: Volume LIV, No. 4, February 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Bearing upon this point was a chart of the Palæolithic Age in Gaul,
drawn up by M. de Mortillet in 1871, and published in the _Bulletin de
la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris_--"the only work of the kind
extant"--in which were recorded five localities in which occurred
supposed traces of man in the Tertiary, forty-one alluvial deposits in
the Quaternary yielding human bones and industrial remains, and two
hundred and seventy-eight caverns containing Quaternary fauna with
traces of prehistoric man.
M. de Mortillet gave in another form his view of the sort of creature
the hypothetical anthropopithecus should be in a paper on Tertiary
Man, read before the Anthropological Section of the French Association
for the Advancement of Science in 1885, when he said the question was
not to find whether man already existed in the Tertiary epoch as he
exists at the present day. Animals varied from one geological epoch to
another, and the higher the animals the greater was the variation. It
was to be inferred, therefore, that man would vary more rapidly than
the other mammals. The problem was to discover in the Tertiary period
an ancestral form of man a predecessor of the man of historical times.
There were, he affirmed, unquestionably in the Tertiary strata objects
which implied the existence of an intelligent being--animals less
intelligent than existing man, but much more intelligent than existing
apes. While the skeleton of this ancestral form of man had not yet
been discovered, he had made himself known to us in the clearest
manner by his works. The general opinion of the meeting after hearing
M. de Mortillet's paper is said to have been that there could be no
longer any doubt of the existence of the supposed ancestral form of
man in the Tertiary period.
The discovery in Java, announced by Dr. Dubois, in 1896, of fossil
remains presenting structural characteristics between those of man and
those of the monkey, to which the name _Pithecanthropus erectus_ was
given, were accepted with hardly a question by M. de Mortillet and his
colleagues as confirming his views.
At a banquet given to M. de Mortillet, May 1, 1884, by a number of
anthropologists, when his portrait was presented to him, the hall was
decorated for the occasion with a life-size picture of an ancient
Gaul, executed according to his latest researches. The man was
represented as having no hair on his body; with very long arms and
very powerful muscles; his feet capable of being used in climbing
trees, but with toes not opposable; his jaw strongly prognathous, but
not at all equal to that of an anthropoid ape; his breadth strongly
compressed laterally and his abdomen prominent; the skin not negroid,
but of our present color; and the expression of his face was about as
intelligent as that of an Australian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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