Gradually we perceive that the advancing cold is driving them
further south, and the monkeys of Gibraltar to-day are the
diminished remnant of the great family that had previously
wandered as far as Britain and France.
A third wave, also spreading in the Miocene, equally obscure in
its connection with the preceding, introduces the man-like apes
to the geologist. Primitive gibbons (Pliopithecus and
Pliobylobates), primitive chimpanzees (Palaeopithecus), and other
early anthropoid apes (Oreopithecus, Dryopithecus, etc.), lived
in the trees of Southern Europe in the second part of the
Tertiary Era. They are clearly disconnected individuals of a
large and flourishing family, but from the half-dozen specimens
we have yet discovered no conclusion can be drawn, except that
the family is already branching into the types of anthropoid apes
which are familiar to us.
Of man himself we have no certain and indisputable trace in the
Tertiary Era. Some remains found in Java of an ape-man
(Pithecanthropus), which we will study later, are now generally
believed, after a special investigation on the spot, to belong to
the Pleistocene period. Yet no authority on the subject doubts
that the human species was evolved in the Tertiary Era, and very
many, if not most, of the authorities believe that we have
definite proof of his presence.
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