Anatomy, Comparative; Embryology, Human; Evolution; Human beings -- Origin
(FIGURE 2.277. The drill-baboon (Cynocephalus leucophaeus) (From
Brehm.))
In the very first exposition of his profound natural classification
(1735) Linne placed the anthropoid mammals at the head of the animal
kingdom, with three genera: man, the ape, and the sloth. He afterwards
called them the "Primates"--the "lords" of the animal world; he then
also separated the lemur from the true ape, and rejected the sloth.
Later zoologists divided the order of Primates. First the Gottingen
anatomist, Blumenbach, founded a special order for man, which he
called Bimana ("two-handed"); in a second order he united the apes and
lemurs under the name of Quadrumana ("four-handed"); and a third order
was formed of the distantly-related Chiroptera (bats, etc.). The
separation of the Bimana and Quadrumana was retained by Cuvier and
most of the subsequent zoologists. It seems to be extremely important,
but, as a matter of fact, it is totally wrong. This was first shown in
1863 by Huxley, in his famous Man's Place in Nature. On the strength
of careful comparative anatomical research he proved that the apes are
just as truly "two-handed" as man; or, if we prefer to reverse it,
that man is as truly four-handed as the ape. He showed convincingly
that the ideas of hand and foot had been wrongly defined, and had been
improperly based on physiological instead of morphological grounds.
The circumstance that we oppose the thumb to the other four fingers in
our hand, and so can grasp things, seemed to be a special distinction
of the hand in contrast to the foot, in which the corresponding great
toe cannot be opposed in this way to the others. But the apes can
grasp with the hind-foot as well as the fore, and so were regarded as
quadrumanous. However, the inability to grasp that we find in the foot
of civilised man is a consequence of the habit of clothing it with
tight coverings for thousands of years. Many of the bare-footed lower
races of men, especially among the negroes, use the foot very freely
in the same way as the hand. As a result of early habit and continued
practice, they can grasp with the foot (in climbing trees, for
instance) just as well as with the hand. Even new-born infants of our
own race can grasp very strongly with the great toe, and hold a spoon
with it as firmly as with the hand. Hence the physiological
distinction between hand and foot can neither be pressed very far, nor
has it a scientific basis. We must look to morphological characters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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