The first question has a predominantly technical interest, and
the authorities are not agreed in replying to it. We saw that, on
the blood-test, man showed a very close relationship to the
anthropoid apes, a less close affinity to the Old World monkeys,
a more remote affinity to the American monkeys, and a very faint
and distant affinity to the femurs. A comparison of their
structures suggests the same conclusion. It is, therefore,
generally believed that the anthropoid apes and man had a common
ancestor in the early Miocene or Oligocene, that this group was
closely related to the ancestral group of the Old World monkeys,
and that all originally sprang from a primitive and generalised
femur-group. In other words, a branch of the earliest femur-like
forms diverges, before the specific femur-characters are fixed,
in the direction of the monkey; in this still vague and
patriarchal group a branch diverges, before the monkey-features
are fixed, in the direction of the anthropoids; and this group in
turn spreads into a number of types, some of which are the
extinct apes of the Miocene, four become the gorilla, chimpanzee,
orang, and gibbon of to-day, and one is the group that will
become man.
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