Anatomy, Comparative; Embryology, Human; Evolution; Human beings -- Origin
The third, and last, stage of our animal ancestry is the true or
speaking man (Homo), who was gradually evolved from the preceding
stage by the advance of animal language into articulate human speech.
As to the time and place of this real "creation of man" we can only
express tentative opinions. It was probably during the Diluvial period
in the hotter zone of the Old World, either on the mainland in
tropical Africa or Asia or on an earlier continent (Lemuria--now sunk
below the waves of the Indian Ocean), which stretched from East Africa
(Madagascar, Abyssinia) to East Asia (Sunda Islands, Further India). I
have given fully in my History of Creation, (chapter 28) the weighty
reasons for claiming this descent of man from the anthropoid eastern
apes, and shown how we may conceive the spread of the various races
from this "Paradise" over the whole earth. I have also dealt fully
with the relations of the various races and species of men to each
other.
SYNOPSIS OF THE CHIEF SECTIONS OF OUR STEM-HISTORY.
FIRST STAGE: THE PROTISTS.
Man's ancestors are unicellular protozoa, originally unnucleated
Monera like the Chromacea, structureless green particles of plasm;
afterwards real nucleated cells (first plasmodomous Protophyta, like
the Palmella; then plasmophagous Protozoa, like the Amoeba).
SECOND STAGE: THE BLASTAEADS.
Man's ancestors are round coenobia or colonies of Protozoa; they
consist of a close association of many homogeneous cells, and thus are
individuals of the second order. They resemble the round
cell-communities of the Magospherae and Volvocina, equivalent to the
ontogenetic blastula: hollow globules, the wall of which consists of a
single layer of ciliated cells (blastoderm).
THIRD STAGE: THE GASTRAEADS.
Man's ancestors are Gastraeads, like the simplest of the actual
Metazoa (Prophysema, Olynthus, Hydra, Pemmatodiscus). Their body
consists merely of a primitive gut, the wall of which is made up of
the two primary germinal layers.
FOURTH STAGE: THE PLATODES.
Man's ancestors have substantially the organisation of simple Platodes
(at first like the cryptocoelic Platodaria, later like the
rhabdocoelic Turbellaria). The leaf-shaped bilateral-symmetrical body
has only one gut-opening, and develops the first trace of a nervous
centre from the ectoderm in the middle line of the back (Figures 2.239
and 2.240).
FIFTH STAGE: THE VERMALIA.
Man's ancestors have substantially the organisation of unarticulated
Vermalia, at first Gastrotricha (Ichthydina), afterwards Frontonia
(Nemertina, Enteropneusta). Four secondary germinal layers develop,
two middle layers arising between the limiting layers (coeloma). The
dorsal ectoderm forms the vertical plate, acroganglion (Figure 2.243).
SIXTH STAGE: THE PROCHORDONIA.
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