ON THE DIFFERENTIATION OF MAN FROM THE ANTHROPOIDS § 1. THE HYPOTHESIS That the human species as we now see it, with its several races, Mongolian, Negro, Mediterranean, etc., represents a Family of the Primates is generally agreed; and there is evidence that the Family formerly comprised other species that have become extinct. Our nearest surviving zoological relatives are the Gorilla, Chimpanzee and Orang, and (at a further remove) the Siamang and Gibbons; and in spite of the fundamental anatomical resemblance between those apes and ourselves, the difference is so great that some explanation of how it came about is very desirable. The differences between Man and his nearest relatives are innumerable; but taking the chief of them, and assuming that the minor details are correlated with these, it is the hypothesis of this essay that they may all be traced to the influence of one variation operating amongst the original anthropoid conditions. That variation was the adoption of a flesh-diet and the habits of a hunter in order to obtain it. Without the adoption of a flesh-diet there could have been no hunting; but a flesh-diet obtained without hunting (supposing it possible) could have done nothing for the evolution of our stock. The adoption of the hunting-life, therefore, is the essential variation upon which everything else depends. We need not suppose that a whole ancestral species varied in this way: it is enough that a few, or even one, of the common anthropoid stock should have done so, and that the variation was advantageous and was inherited. Such a variation _must_ have occurred at some time, since Man is everywhere more or less carnivorous; the earliest known men were hunters; weapons are among the earliest known artefacts. And it is not improbable that the change began at the anthropoid level; because although extant anthropoids are mainly frugivorous, yet they occasionally eat birds’-eggs and young birds; the gorilla has been said to eat small mammals; and other Primates (cebidæ, macaques and baboons) eat insects, arachnids, crabs, worms, frogs, lizards, birds; and the crab-eating macaque collects a large portion of its food on the Malay littoral. Why, then, should not one ape have betaken itself to hunting? We need not suppose that our ancestors were ever exclusively carnivorous: that is very unlikely. A mixed diet is the rule even amongst hunting tribes, and everywhere the women collect and consume fruits and roots. But if at first nearly omnivorous, our ancestor (it is assumed) soon preferred to attack mammals, and advanced at a remote date to the killing of the biggest game found in his habitat. Everywhere savage hunters do so now: the little Semang kills the tiger, rhinoceros, elephant and buffalo; and many thousands of years ago, in Europe men slew the reindeer and the mammoth, the horse and the bison, the hyæna and the cave-bear. It is true they had weapons and snares, whilst the first hunter had only hands and teeth.