Klaatsch (Die Stellung der Menschen im Naturganzen, 1911) (Evolution and Progress of Mankind, 1923) made a larger de mand on the powers of evolution to reach the same end by diverse routes. This voluminous author traced the origin of mankind to an anthropoid ancestry, but supposed that the ancient inhabitants of Europe—Neanderthal man, known only from his fossil remains, and the living Negro peoples of Africa had arisen from the same stock as the gorilla and chimpanzee, while Mongolian peoples and men of the modern European type had sprung from the same lineage as the orang. Klaatsch believed in the polygenetic origin of human races.
Man an Aberrant Primate.—In charting the family tree of the Higher Primates modern authorities differ as to the position which should be assigned to man. Prof. Eugene Dubois represents the human stem as the main and direct continuation of the trunk of the primate tree (Nature, vol. liii., p. 245, 1896) ; from this , main trunk all the other members of the primate order are made to come off as side branches. Man is given the central position of
his order; he forms the apex of the primate tree. Prof. Elliot Smith (Evolution of Man, 1925) also gives the human family the central position as a direct continuation of the main primate stem. In reality man is the most aberrant member of his order; in brain and in the modifications of his lower limbs he has departed far ther from the ancestral primate state, so far as we know that state by the study of fossil remains, than any member of the order ; he has retained less of the structural organization of the original primate than all the others. Apparently in the evolution of the higher primates there has been the same tendency as is to be noted in modern political parties—a tendency for an extreme wing to move ever further from the central group of conservatism. The human family represents the extreme wing in the order of pri mates ; Tarsius, greatly modified as it is, retains the essentials of the central or conservative group.