[56] _Prehistoric Man_, 3rd edit. vol. i. p. 117. 3. Yet another important line of evidence as to the extreme antiquity of the human type has been brought prominently forward by Prof. Mivart.[57] He shows, by a careful comparison of all parts of the structure of the body, that man is related not to any one, but almost equally to many of the existing apes--to the orang, the chimpanzee, the gorilla, and even to the gibbons--in a variety of ways; and these relations and differences are so numerous and so diverse that, on the theory of evolution, the ancestral form which ultimately developed into man must have diverged from the common stock whence all these various forms and their extinct allies originated. But so far back as the Miocene deposits of Europe we find the remains of apes allied to these various forms, and especially to the gibbons; so that in all probability the special line of variation which led up to man branched off at a still earlier period. And these early forms, being the initiation of a far higher type, and having to develop by natural selection into so specialized and altogether distinct a creature as man, must have risen at a very early period into the position of a dominant race, and spread in dense waves of population over all suitable portions of the great continent--for this, on Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis, is essential to developmental progress through the agency of natural selection. [57] _Man and Apes_, pp. 171-193. Under these circumstances we might certainly expect to find some relics of these earlier forms of man along with those of animals, which were presumably less abundant. Negative evidence of this kind is not very weighty, but still it has _some_ value. It has been suggested that as apes are mostly tropical, and anthropoid apes are now confined almost exclusively to the vicinity of the equator, we should expect the ancestral forms of man to have inhabited these same localities--West Africa and the Malay Islands. But this objection is hardly valid, because existing anthropoid apes are wholly dependent on a perennial supply of easily accessible fruits, which is only found near the equator; while not only had the south of Europe an almost tropical climate in Miocene times, but we must suppose even the earliest ancestors of man to have been terrestrial and omnivorous, since it must have taken ages of slow modification to have produced the perfectly erect form, the short arms, and the wholly non-prehensile foot,[58] which so strongly differentiate man from the arboreal apes.