Monkey people

Monkey people - the alleged ancestors of man , hominids , which are a transitional stage of evolution from an animal - a monkey - to a person . Proponents of the existence of such a step disagreed on how the apes looked like: from the found fragments of bones, which, according to scientists, could belong to an ape man, it is almost impossible to determine the details. The theory of the existence of an ape man was actively discussed at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries . The problem was dealt with by Gabriel Mortille , Haeckel and Focht .

After Darwin's Origin of Species came out and Focht published Lectures on a Man, His Place in the Universe and in the History of the Earth , where a hypothesis was put forward of the origin of man from a monkey, Haeckel showed such a pedigree chain in which he noticed a missing link . He named him Pithecanthropus alalus - a monkey man. Therefore, when in 1891, on the island of Java, Eugene Dubois discovered the remains of an unknown anthropoid, he was taken for the missing link and was called a pithecanthropus .

Currently, most scientists believe that Pithecanthropus as a representative of the subspecies Homo erectus are not human ancestors. However, this does not mean that Homo erectus is not related to the origin of modern man, since not only Javanese people belonged to this species. This does not mean that between the monkey-like ancestors of man and modern Homo sapiens there was only one transitional species. On the contrary, the accumulated archaeological material allows us to distinguish species such as Homo habilis , H. erectus , H. ergaster , H. antecessor , H. heidelbergensis and others that could participate in anthropogenesis .

The irrelevance of the question of monkey-humans is also related to the fact that man himself in modern taxonomy is classified as a monkey (a family of hominids of the superfamily of anthropoid apes ), while in the XIX century this was not yet obvious.