Project Gutenberg's On Some Fossil Remains of Man, by Thomas H. Huxley

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Title: On Some Fossil Remains of Man

Author: Thomas H. Huxley

Posting Date: January 6, 2009 [EBook #2933]
Release Date: November, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Amy E. Zelmer

ON SOME FOSSIL REMAINS OF MAN

By Thomas H. Huxley

I HAVE endeavoured to show, in the preceding Essay, that the ANTHROPINI,
or Man Family, form a very well defined group of the Primates, between
which and the immediately following Family, the CATARHINI, there is, in
the existing world, the same entire absence of any transitional form or
connecting link, as between the CATARHINI and PLATYRHINI.

It is a commonly received doctrine, however, that the structural
intervals between the various existing modifications of organic beings
may be diminished, or even obliterated, if we take into account the long
and varied succession of animals and plants which have preceded those
now living and which are known to us only by their fossilized remains.
How far this doctrine is well based, how far, on the other hand, as our
knowledge at present stands, it is an overstatement of the real facts of
the case, and an exaggeration of the conclusions fairly deducible from
them, are points of grave importance, but into the discussion of which
I do not, at present, propose to enter. It is enough that such a view of
the relations of extinct to living beings has been propounded, to lead
us to inquire, with anxiety, how far the recent discoveries of human
remains in a fossil state bear out, or oppose, that view.

I shall confine myself, in discussing this question, to those
fragmentary Human skulls from the caves of Engis in the valley of
the Meuse, in Belgium, and of the Neanderthal near Dusseldorf, the
geological relations of which have been examined with so much care
by Sir Charles Lyell; upon whose high authority I shall take it for
granted, that the Engis skull belonged to a contemporary of the Mammoth
('Elephas primigenius') and of the woolly Rhinoceros ('Rhinoceros
tichorhinus'), with the bones of wh