Abstract
WHEN King George came to the throne, anthropologists had begun to realise that man's family tree was to prove a much more complicated thing than was anticipated. The discoveries made in France between 1907 and 1909 compelled them to abandon the idea that mankind had been evolved by a single progressive series of stages which, beginning in an ape-like stage, ended in the races of modern humanity. They had to give up the single-stemmed family tree and substitute for it one with rather a shrub-like outline. Most of them regarded Neanderthal man as a stage in the evolution of modern man. The discoveries made in France, at the date just mentioned, proved that this could not be so, and that Neanderthal man, after occupying Europe for a large part of the pleistocene period, had been suddenly replaced by representatives of modern or neanthropic man. Whether the neanthropic races, which replaced the Neanderthal inhabitants of Europe, came from Africa or from Asia still awaits determination. Neanderthal man could not be fitted into any single-stemmed scheme; he represented the end twig of a dead branch. Since 1910, several more dead branches have been discovered and fitted into provisional reconstructions of man's family tree.
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KEITH, A. Conceptions of Man's Ancestry. Nature 135, 705–708 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135705a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135705a0