Page:Darwinism by Alfred Wallace 1889.djvu/483

 we consider that, even in our own day, men are not unfrequently overwhelmed by volcanic eruptions, as in Java and Japan, or carried away in vast numbers by floods, as in Bengal and China, it seems impossible but that ample remains of Miocene and Pliocene man do exist buried in the most recent layers of the earth's crust, and that more extended research or some fortunate discovery will some day bring them to light.

It has usually been considered that the ancestral form of man originated in the tropics, where vegetation is most abundant and the climate most equable. But there are some important objections to this view. The anthropoid apes, as well as most of the monkey tribe, are essentially arboreal in their structure, whereas the great distinctive character of man is his special adaptation to terrestrial locomotion. We can hardly suppose, therefore, that he originated in a forest region, where fruits to be obtained by climbing are the chief vegetable food. It is more probable that he began his existence on the open plains or high plateaux of the temperate or sub-tropical zone, where the seeds of indigenous cereals and numerous herbivora, rodents, and game-birds, with fishes and molluscs in the lakes, rivers, and seas supplied him with an abundance of varied food. In such a region he would develop skill as a hunter, trapper, or fisherman, and later as a herdsman and cultivator,—a succession of which we find indications in the palaeolithic and neolithic races of Europe.

In seeking to determine the particular areas in which his earliest traces are likely to be found, we are restricted to some portion of the Eastern hemisphere, where alone the anthropoid apes exist, or have apparently ever existed.

There is good reason to believe, also, that Africa must be excluded, because it is known to have been separated from the northern continent in early tertiary times, and to have acquired its existing fauna of the higher mammalia by a later union with that continent after the separation from it of Madagascar, an island which has preserved for us a sample, as it were, of the early African mammalian fauna, from which not only the anthropoid apes, but all the higher quadrumana are