| Abstract: |
Human beings have populated Southeast Asia since remotest antiquity. Some of the most ancient and primitive vestiges of human culture on earth have been found here. It is recognized by a majority of present-day scholars that this region was within the area in which mankind came into being, the territory where the transition from primates to men occurred. As long ago as the end of the 19th century, Haeckel, an outstanding naturalist and a follower of Darwin, recommended that searches for the osseous remains of ape-men - beings intermediate between subhuman primates and men - be conducted specifically in Southeast Asia, where higher primates are found today and where there was reason to assume the existence, at the transition point from the Tertiary to the Quaternary geological periods, about a million years ago, of the most favorable conditions for primates to acquire human characteristics. In pursuit of this advice, Dubois engaged in a quest for such remains on the islands of Indonesia and, in 1891 and 1892, found what he had been looking for, discovering, in Java, the bones of the renowned Pithecanthropus, the most ancient and primitive apelike man.
|
