Abstract
In his Origin of Species Charles Darwin was very reticent on the question of human descent. He had already considered the problem of Man by the end of the 1830s, when the principle of evolution through variation and natural selection took shape in his mind,1 but all we read about our species in the Origin, published in 1859, is that: “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”2 In spite of this caution the implications of evolutionary theory for Man were immediately clear to the attentive reader: humans belonged to the animal kingdom, and had developed from lower forms by a gradual process of variation and natural selection. Many people also came to the immediate conclusion that our far-distant ancestors must be sought within the line of primates.
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Notes
See for example Herbert, “The Place of Man”.
Darwin, Origin, 488.
See for example Zacharias, The Construction of a Primate Order, chapter 6; Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors, 75–78, 143.
For Wallace’s viewpoint on the position of Man, see Kottler, “Wallace, the Origin of Man and Spiritualism”; Schwartz, “Darwin, Wallace, and the Descent of Man”.
Wallace, “On the Origin of Human Races”.
Wallace, Contributions, 303–331.
Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature, 144.
See Zacharias, The Construction of a Primate Order, 204, 290–292; Montgomery, Evolution and Darwinism, 95.
Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, 501–515.
See Montgomery, Evolution and Darwinism, 96–97.
Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology, 25.
Harvey, “Evolutionism Transformed”. See also Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology, 42–50.
Harvey, “Evolutionism Transformed”, 292.
Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology, 39–42, 50–55. For the situation in England, see also Burrow, “Evolution and Anthropology”; Stewart, “The Effect of Darwin’s Theory”, 12–17.
Cuvier, Discours, 131.
Grayson, Human Antiquity, 120–132.
Grayson, Human Antiquity., 172–176.
For these excavations and their importance for the acknowledgement of Boucher’s work, see Gruber, “Brixham Cave”; Grayson, Human Antiquity, 179–195.
Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature, 168–208, in particular 205–208.
Lyell, Antiquity of Man, 75–92, 369. Assessment of the Neanderthal skull was hampered by the fact that one of the skulls found at Engis by Schmerling, which revealed a more modern morphology, was thought to be equally old.
Darwin, Descent of Man, 146.
Wallace, “On the Origin of Human Races”, CLXVII.
King, “The Neanderthal Skull”.
See For the discovery of Neanderthal Man and the subsequent discussion, see Gruber, “The Neanderthal Controversy”; Eiseley, Darwin’s Century, 272–279; Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology, 140–151.
See For the discovery of Neanderthal Man and the subsequent discussion, see Gruber, “The Neanderthal Controversy”; Eiseley, Darwin’s Century, 272–279; Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology, 140–151
Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology, 24–25.
Haeckel, Das Menschenproblem, 27, 62.
Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology, 155–159.
Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology, 159–165.
Haeckel, Systematische Phylogenie, 618.
Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology, 66–123, passim. Oldroyd gives a concise explanation for the scant influence evolutionary theory had on the formation of anthropological theory in his Darwinian Impacts, 298–308.
Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology, 66–99; Stocking, “The Persistence of Polygenist Thought”.
See Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology, 66–123, passim. Oldroyd gives a concise explanation for the scant influence evolutionary theory had on the formation of anthropological theory in his Darwinian Impacts, 298–308.
Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology, 114–115.
Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology,149, 161–165.
Stebbins, French Reactions to Darwin, 203; Erickson, Origins of Physical Anthropology, 39–55, in particular 49–50.
Quoted in Grayson, Human Antiquity, 211.
Quoted in Eiseley, Darwin’s Century, 276. For that matter Gill was no anti-evolutionist. He did not exclude the possibility that missing links might one day be discovered, but if so, they would be found in geological layers older than those in which the human fossils known up to then been encountered.
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Theunissen, B. (1989). The Nineteenth-Century Background. In: Eugène Dubois and the Ape-Man from Java. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2209-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2209-9_2
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