Did Charles Darwin at the end of his life renounce his theory of human evolution? Did ancient people find dinosaurs? Is it true that Russia is the cradle of mankind, and who is the Yeti - is it not one of our ancestors who got lost in the centuries? Although paleoanthropology - the science of human evolution - is experiencing a rapid flowering, the origin of man is still surrounded by many myths. These are anti-evolutionary theories, and legends generated by mass culture, and pseudo-scientific ideas that exist among educated and well-read people. Do you want to know how it was "really"? Alexander Sokolov, editor-in-chief of the portal ANTROPOGENESIS.RU, has collected a whole collection of such myths and checked how well they are.

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Missing link between ape and man not found

An extremely popular myth, which completely sounds like this: “Scientists have been looking for 100 years, but the notorious “missing link” has not been found ...”

The term "missing link" began to be used in the 19th century. In particular, Ernst Haeckel suggested that between a man and his ancestor - an ancient ape - there must have been some intermediate creature - Pithecanthropus, the remains of which at that time had yet to be discovered.

In this sense, the term is still used today, mainly by journalists and in popular literature. Specialists have long understood that since the formation of man is a long process, and evolution is continuous, there were MANY LINKS between the humanoid primate that lived 10 million years ago and modern man. These links are gradually, one after another, paleo; anthropologists have been discovering over the past 100 years… The result is not a link, but a CHAIN.

Therefore, the specialist will definitely clarify: the missing link between whom and whom?

Between monkey and man? Too vague, any of the Australopithecus is suitable for this role ...

Between Homo sapiens and Pithecanthropus ( Homo erectus )? Then this Homo heidelbergensis who lived 500,000 years ago.

Between Homo erectus and Australopithecus? Homo habilis, a skilled man, 2 million years ago.

Between four-legged and two-legged? Ardipithecus, 4.5 million years ago.

Common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees and gorillas? Nakalipitek, 10 million years ago.

Common ancestor of great great apes? Proconsul, over 15 million years ago.

Common ancestor of all primates? Purgatorius, this is generally the end of the Cretaceous period.

S. V. Drobyshevsky comments:

The claim that "the missing link has not been found" became a misconception around the 1970s, when materials on all major stages of human evolution accumulated. At the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, with the description of the “early Australopithecus” group, the problem of missing links finally lost its relevance. At present, it is no longer “missing links” that are being found, but “gaps between intermediate links”. There are so many finds that it is their large number that becomes a problem for anthropologists, since it is already difficult to operate with such a large amount of material.

Meanwhile, new species of fossil hominids continue to be discovered with enviable regularity.

For example, in 2010 alone, three species were described:

Australopithecus sediba (a typical “link between links”, not quite a man yet, but not quite an Australopithecus anymore);

Homo Gautengensis (earliest man from South Africa);

The mysterious "Denisov man" (for which there is no formal Latin name yet).

It is clear that with each discovery, with each new species described, the picture becomes more detailed ... and more complex. Well, such are the laws of knowledge!

Imagine that we have forms A and C, and between them - a "missing link":

Let's now assume that we have found this "missing link" B:

Everything is fine? It wasn't there! If we are dealing with a continuous series, now we have TWO missing links:

But a person who is far from science does not like this state of affairs. People like to solve simple problems (for example, guessing letters in the game "Field of Miracles"), but they do not put up with the existence of complex problems that cannot be solved in a minute, hour, day, and even more so in years. Mass consciousness requires primitive models. The brand "Missing Link" is perfect for this role.

Therefore, as soon as paleoanthropologists report a new species of human ancestor, journalists begin to yell: “The missing link has finally been found!”

And the townsfolk, far from anthropology, are surprised: what, again?

And further. About 70 years ago, when there were not so many such finds, the situation seemed relatively simple. Once upon a time there was an Australopithecus, then a Pithecanthropus, then a Neanderthal, etc. originated from it. When the finds began to accumulate, it turned out that many upright humanoid creatures once lived on our planet. For example, 2–4 million years ago, several species of Australopithecus roamed Africa at once. And you can be sure that new species, currently unknown, will be described in the near future! Obviously, one of the Australopithecus gave rise to the human race. But it is also indisputable that all of them could not be our ancestors at the same time ... Who exactly from the Australopithecus is our ancestor? Or maybe there were several ancestors? After all, many species of primates can interbreed, forming hybrids.

Imagine that in the attic of an old house (let's say you have an old house), in a dusty corner, there is a box of yellowed family photos. Some gentlemen in old-fashioned suits, ladies in beautiful dresses ... Everything - the facial features in the photo, the surroundings, the very place where the photos were found - indicates that your relatives are in the pictures. There are definitely your great-grandfather and great-grandmother here, but also their relatives, cousins, second cousins ​​​​and sisters ... If only one or two people appeared in the photographs, everything would be simple. But since there are many people, there will probably be several candidates for your direct ancestors.

To a reader who is far from science, it may seem: scientists are wiser ... But is it only in anthropology that simple models give way to more complex ones? After all, now we know that our planet Earth is actually not perfectly round. And Thompson's first model of the atom, the so-called "raisin cake", was far from what we are used to seeing.

Summary

Models are getting more complex, but the basic principles have not gone away, and the debate is about “details of details”. The earth is not perfect, but still a sphere. The path from ancient monkey to modern man was long and winding, but we know the stages of this path, and the sequence of human ancestors is better studied than for any other type of living organisms. Of course, I want to find all the ancestors one by one, but there is no such complete sequence even in the Bible.

Experts like these two words less than journalists, because their meaning is not very clear to specialists, while journalists, as usual, understand everything very well.

After the Piltdown Man, in Koenigswald's phrase, was disqualified and out of the game, the human pedigree looked slender, even menacingly slender.

If you don’t worry too much about thousands or tens of thousands of years and divide the history of mankind not by generations or civilizations, but “by and large”, that is, by anthropological types, then you and I will be at the top of the family tree. Having said this, we immediately count 30 - 50 millennia, because over the past 300 - 500 centuries, fundamental changes in the physical structure of man seem to have not happened (we say "as if", because anthropologists, you see, tomorrow they will discover something, and everything will change). So we are.

Before us Neanderthals. These powerful guys with monstrous muscles and a big head (not smaller, but sometimes larger than ours), obviously, owned the planet for about 100 thousand years. Between a Neanderthal and a human of our type, there must be a missing link that connects everyone into a single chain. Otherwise, we will not understand anything, and we do not like it.

But since in this chapter we will talk about another missing link, much earlier, then we will go to it.

If Neanderthals, in a broad sense, are our fathers, then Sinanthropes have been walking in grandfathers for a long time.

Neanderthals were 100 thousand years ago, and Sinanthropes - 300-400 thousand. They are separated by millennial abysses, gigantic epochs of migrations, transformations, disappearances, appearances. How Sinanthropus became a Neanderthal, whether the one discovered by Black turned into Sinanthropus or died out, and his contemporaries went to progress, we don’t know, we don’t know for a long time, we don’t know when we will find out.

It's not just a missing link - it's missing, one might say, all the links, except for one or two that we got. But what to do? If it were possible to “enlighten” the earth and immediately find bones in the depths! (By the way, physicists and archaeologists are seriously thinking about this.) Sinanthropus-grandfather. Pithecanthropes are great-grandfathers, half a million years old and older. In 1954, the French anthropologist Arambur discovered in Morocco, in a deep sandy quarry, an African Pithecanthropus, "Atlanthropus". Recently, the Hungarian researcher Vertesz obtained the occipital bone of a Pithecanthropus near Lake Balaton... A giant man was obviously a contemporary of Pithecanthropus, but we will consider him a lateral branch, nothing more than a great-grandfather.

All known Pithecanthropes were contemporaries in the sense that our contemporaries are the builders of the Egyptian pyramids and the last inhabitants of the ancient caves. The most ancient, archaic human being seems to have been a Mojokert child. For quite a long time he was considered the first person. This small skull was something of a milestone left by a reconnaissance party that had wandered further than others into the depths of a dark, mysterious continent. Somewhere here, they thought, shortly before Pithecanthropus, that very miracle, a leap, a sacrament happened, when the last monkey suddenly proclaimed himself the first man. By the middle of our century, researchers were, as it were, at the edge of that most important event in the history of the Earth, which is sometimes called the missing link for brevity.

I feel that not all readers of these lines understand why I am discussing so much now: just think, for some number of millennia before Pithecanthropus, a developed ape guessed to take a stick or another object, and it all started. What's special here?

Understand how it's not easy. Why exactly did the monkey, and not some other cunning, intelligent creature (dolphins!) do this? What was supposed to happen inside the creature that jumped "over the abyss"? Why did the billion-year evolution only at this moment, at this stage, unite animate and inanimate nature, that is, make a highly organized being take a primitive lifeless object in its paw (hand) - a stick, a stone? What is the "formula" that led to this connection: brain weight? Bipedal? Energy? (Any higher mammal consumes approximately 125 thousand kilocalories of energy per 1 kilogram of its weight in its life - this is the norm allotted to it for life. A person consumes 6 times more per 1 kilogram, approximately 750 thousand kilocalories. This gigantic energy jump is only one from fragments of the mystery that Darwin and his opponents saw, but explained in different ways.)

If I am still not convinced that I am talking about the most wonderful moment of being, I will try to solve this problem in the future, but for now I ask you to take my word for it that the greatest event in the history of our planet, the second most important after the birth of life on Earth, happened at least 600 thousand years ago and no more than...

This is where the serious conversation starts.

Pithecanthropus is already "on her side." He is more of a man. In the absence of a line separating it from that side, human and ape, we will immediately jump to the one where, without a doubt, the monkeys are already. It is known that there were many monkeys of the Tertiary period, and they inhabited almost the whole world, not like now. If we talk about ancient anthropoids, that is, anthropoid apes, more than twenty of them have already been found.

All of them, however, are too old for our task, the ancient great apes. Some are tens of millions of years old (Driopithecus, a gorilla-like fossil ape found in France).

Dryopithecus

20-25 million years Proconsul. This interesting ancient monkey, a chimpanzee fossil, was found in East Africa 35 years ago by one of the best fossil hunters, Dr. Leakey, whose meeting is yet to come. (The name Proconsul was given in honor of one of the most popular monkeys of the London Zoo, called the Consul. The difference between the "Roman officials" was 25 million years, which did not bother anyone).

Proconsul

Interesting ancient monkeys were found in India (Ramapitek, Sivapitek), in Egypt (Fayum monkey), but they are also no less than tens of millions of years old.

Indian monkeys and dryopithecus, according to some signs, can (very conditionally) be considered our great-great-great-grandfathers. The proconsul is curious because, apparently, he lived even before the division of the great apes into two parties: “If you go to the right, you will be a man, to the left, you will remain an ape.”

Apparently, 10-12 million years ago, in the warm Tertiary forests, this delimitation was just being laid.

Approximately 10 million years ago, one group of great apes was able to take the human path; for several million years, the members of this group remained monkeys, without losing the chance of humanization, then there were major changes in the world and the monkeys changed accordingly, and about a million years ago there was a jump.

There are many things in this long sentence that constitute the greatest problem.

“10 million years ago” - or maybe much earlier or, on the contrary, later, and everything happened faster?

"One group of monkeys" - but why one? Perhaps several groups moved towards humanization, and, as we will see later, there are serious grounds for such a hypothesis.

“She was able to take the human path,” “without losing her chances,” but the monkey did not understand what was happening to her, did not want to become human consciously, because she could not figure out what it was. The advanced ape wanted to eat, drink, multiply, that is, to exist ... We only guess that when the great apes managed to adapt to life - they learned to jump trees better, became invincible giants, or somehow arranged their life, as soon as they became full and happy, but immediately the path to a person was closed for them: specialization gave success, but led to a dead end.

"Major changes" - you know, of course, what it is about: the establishment of a dry, cool climate, the need to climb down from the trees, develop a hand, and so on and so forth.

But a terrible thought! And if the climate had remained warm and humid for another 20-40 million years? Well, so would the monkey live in the trees and not become human? Or in other words: maybe the warm Tertiary million years are very reactionary, and if it had become cold a million years earlier, then the satellites would have been flying already in the time of the Pithecanthropes?

“About a million years ago” - you can guess where the figure comes from: only because of its proximity to the times of Pithecanthropus. But no one vouched for this figure.

So, the missing link is the 5,000 "where"? 7 thousand "how"? 10 thousand "why"?

"How" and "why" - this has already been said.

The rest is "where".

The complexity of the problem is well reflected in an old student joke:

Professor: You don't know anything. I give you one last choice - two easy questions or one hard one? Student: One question is always better than two. Professor: Where did the first man appear? Student: On the Arbat. Professor: How so? Student: This is the second question...

But isn't there some bias in the professor's first question?

Is it not implied that the first man appeared necessarily in one place?

But who and when proved it?

If it be asked more nobly: "Where could the first people appear?" - then you can think about it.

America and Australia are not running. There are no great apes there, traces of the late settlement of these continents have been preserved.

Europe. Of course, the Heidelberg jaw is an argument. Dryopitec too. Three years ago, a discovery of a very ancient man was made, but has not yet been published, near Lake Balaton in Hungary. And yet, the oldest monkeys and the first fossil people were found here less than in Asia and Africa, and if we recall that Europe has been surveyed best of all, then we have the right to assume that Sinanthropes and Pithecanthropes are not originally Europeans. In addition, it is difficult to imagine that before Sinanthropus, our distant ancestor, who did not yet own fire, was disposed to live near glaciers.

So, Asia and Africa! Among other things, these are the continents on which great apes live today.

Asia, Africa.

For a long time, Asia was preferred, and there was one, but a very good reason for that: fossil ape-men were found in Asia, but not in Africa. Then they began to lean towards Africa for a no less convincing reason. In Africa they began to find more, and in Asia - less.

In any case, the center of world production of the missing link over the past decade has clearly moved to the right mainland.

Raymond Dart was one of nine children of an Australian farmer. His father managed to send him to England to study medicine, and there the young man was lucky: his professors were well-known anatomists and anthropologists - Elliot Smith and Arthur Keess, but he learned no less from one of his subordinates. The assistant in the laboratory of young Dart turned out to be the Russian emigrant Kulchitsky, a Kharkov professor in the past, one of the largest researchers of the nervous system.

The young man was embarrassed by the need to command a world-famous scientist, but he managed to learn a lot from him.

In 1922, Dart received a teaching position at the University of Johannesburg. Before leaving for South Africa, Arthur Keess noticed that in his papers, Dart answered the question of religion everywhere: "Freethinker." Keess decided to warn the young scientist: “South Africa has a strong Calvinist atmosphere. I would write in the column "religion" - "Protestant". They won't ask what sort of Protestant you are or what you're protesting against. Everything will work out.”

Dart, however, did not agree to such a peculiar interpretation of the "protest" and soon sailed with his wife to South Africa, hoping there to thoroughly study the microstructure of the nervous system. But already on the ship, the fate of the scientist began to be determined somewhat differently.

Together with the Darts, a nurse was returning home. The scientist asked her if anything was heard of fossil finds in this completely unexplored country. Oddly enough, such a coincidence, but it was this sister who was able to tell something: one of her patients, who was engaged in diamond mining, once showed her a strange petrified skull. The nurse found him too small for a human, but too big for a baboon, a typical South African monkey. The superstitious prospector intended to bury the skull so that misfortune would not befall him. Dart later tried to find the man, but to no avail.

South Africa at that time was still quite distant and romantic. In the 20s of our century, writers and archaeologists talked a lot about the mysterious cities of Zimbabwe, about the mines of King Solomon in the Kalahari Desert, about the mysterious diamond coast ... Perhaps these endless conversations only increased the atmosphere of monotony and boredom into which Raymond Dart plunged, arriving in Johannesburg, a city at that time sleepy, hot, crowded with identical houses with red roofs. The local intelligentsia, represented mainly by old immigrants from Holland, the Boers (Afrikaners), were wary of the stranger. He looked for a way out, doing a lot of medicine and, on occasion, anthropology.

So it took about two years.

On Sundays, Dart often went out of town to hunt for fossils. Gradually, he managed to infect students with his reasoning about the missing link, fossil bones and ancient monkeys. One day, a scientist announced that he would give a prize of 5 pounds to whoever finds a fossil.

And then came the spring day of 1924, when Dart's assistant, Miss Josephine Salmon, appeared in front of the chief very excited. She was visiting the lime campaign director and noticed a strange skull on the mantelpiece. The girl began to question, and they explained to her that this was a gift from the distant Taungs lime mine, located in Bechuanaland, on the edge of the great Kalahari Desert. There, among the high dolomite cliffs, a river flows, from which caves are clearly visible - depressions in the banks. Josephine Salmon assured the professor that the skull of a fossilized baboon lay on the mantelpiece. Dart was doubtful, but excited: every new fossil species is precious, and monkeys in particular. When the girl brought the skull, it immediately became clear that it was indeed an ancient baboon. Darth was struck by a strange hole in the skullcap, as if made by a blunt weapon.

Further events unfolded as follows: Dart shared the news with a familiar geologist Jung, who contacted the authorities of the distant Ta-ungs mine, went to the desert and, returning, told Dart that he had met an old miner named de Bruyne. For many years, this miner has been amateurly collecting bones that often come across during work, and just last week he found several blocks into which some ancient remains were “embedded”. Dart was promised they would be sent.

Several days passed, Dart sat at the window, waiting for the guests to arrive - the newlyweds, having met - » who were living in this house for the first time and now wished to visit its owners. However, instead of guests, two workers in railway uniforms appeared at the gate, carrying two large boxes. Mrs. Dart irritatedly remarked that it would not be bad to send the workers away until tomorrow, so as not to spoil the costume and celebration, but the scientist had already tore off the “hated collar” and rushed to the boxes, without even waiting for the African servants (which was prescribed by the etiquette of Johannesburg). The first drawer contained random bones, eggshells, and other not-too-interesting items. But as soon as the lid of box No. 2 was broken, the petrified skull lid appeared. Even if it were a fossil great ape, it would still be an event. However, at first glance, Dart saw that this was not an ordinary skull: it had both monkey and quite human features and, although it was not too large for a man, it was still three times the skull of a baboon. Breaking the box, Dart found another part of the skull and lower jaw.

“Guests!” the wife exclaimed. Dart rushed off to change clothes, but later honestly admitted that he did not remember any details of the family holiday, but during the gala dinner he ran out several times to look at the fossils.

Ancient ape or ape-man?

For two months, Dart carefully examined and cleaned his trophy. He wrote that "no jeweler has ever handled a priceless treasure more lovingly and with such care." I had to work with a hammer, chisel and knitting needle, in constant fear of damaging the skull. For consultation, Dart went to Cape Town and learned, among other things, that a few years ago a fossil baboon similar to that brought by Josephine Salmon had been found. Looking at the Cape Town baboon, Dart noticed that his skull had also been crushed by a malicious blow.

On the 37th day of work, December 23, 1924, the skull from Taungs was finally freed from the stone. (Of course, Dart carefully preserved the "stone dust", and after 33 years Kenneth Oakley, having examined this rock with the help of his chemistry, found that it consisted of pink sands cemented with lime: this meant that the owner of the skull was surrounded by a desert or semi-desert.)

Now Dart could see the "face". It was not the "face" of a gorilla or other advanced ape, but rather the "face" of a human child, with many milk teeth and permanent teeth beginning to erupt. “I doubt,” writes Dart, “that any parent was more proud of his offspring than I was of my Taungs baby at Christmas 1925.”

Assessing the brain of his baby, Dart determined its volume (as it turned out later, with exaggeration) at 400-800 cubic centimeters (gorilla-600, Pithecanthropus-900!).

In the Taungs cave there were also the remains of fifteen animals (baboons, antelopes, turtles, freshwater crabs). Unfortunately, the time when these animals lived in Africa was not known. Species of fossil elephants, rhinos, horses, and wild boars important for dating were not found.

Since, however, almost all the species found in the cave have died out by now, it was decided that the baby from Taungs lived a long time ago, more than a million years ago. Dart, rightly assuming that in ancient times there was a desert in these parts, approximately restored the way of life of his baby and his parents: they lived near the river, there was almost no rain. The large animals found in the cave "could not have been caught by one creature from Taungs (no matter how big it was): apparently, the monkeys acted together, in packs. Dart was extremely interested in holes and cracks in the skulls of animals. All the experts who examined them agreed that the blows were inflicted by something like a hammer and during the life (or rather, at the last moment of life) of the monkey. One expert suggested that the skull was cracked due to the fall of a baboon from a tree. Dart in response put forward only two objections: firstly, baboons they don’t climb trees, and secondly, there were no trees in those parts.

So a tempting picture loomed: a monkey with some human traits (but still a monkey, a pithecus, not an anthropus), living long before the pithecanthropus. In view of the dry climate, it should get on its feet, grow wiser, maybe start using tools. Here it is, missing link; maybe that's how it was!

But one baby for the whole link was clearly not enough. Just as Pithecanthropus I lacked Pithecanthropus II, III, IV, so the new candidate for ancestors also needed comrades.

Dart, however, believed in his discovery and, contrary to the customs that recommended caution and slowness, in early 1925 he sent a message to the English journal Nature about the discovery of Australopithecus Africanus. "Australopithecine" meant "southern monkey".

Australopithecus africanus

Most scholars have seen fit to doubt. Working in South Africa, the English (more precisely, Scottish) zoologist Robert Broom was one of the first to arrive in Johannesburg, but the teeth of the creature convinced him completely. Elliot Smith cautiously agreed. On the other hand, a whole detachment of specialists seemed to unite with the press for rude counterattacks. “There is no scientist, even an objective one,” wrote Broom, “who would not oppose one who refuses to look at things the way he does. But, even bearing in mind this usual pattern, Dart, I think, was attacked too harshly. Experts exercised their humor over the unusual and, in their opinion, unacceptable combination of Latin and Greek in the word "Australopithecine". ("Australis" is "southern" in Latin; "pi-tekos" is "monkey" in Greek.) At the same time, Dart received a hundred threatening letters from around the world. It was in 1925 that the infamous "commitment process" unfolded in the United States, the governor and Congress of Tennessee banned the teachings of Darwin.

The Sunday Times once ran a letter to Dart:

“Man, stop, think! You, with your brilliant brain that God gave you, have become one of the best agents of Satan... How will evolution help you when you die and undergo decay?..»

Signature: "Respecting you, backward, but sane woman."

One might expect that in conservative, religious South Africa, the Darwinist will get even harder, but the ways in which public opinion moves are as inscrutable as scientific ones ... The inhabitants of Johannesburg were seized, first of all, by pride the professor has made such a wonderful discovery that London and New York want to discredit. Patriotism took over Calvinism. These feelings were especially intensified when the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII), arriving in Johannesburg, first of all wished to meet the "baby of Professor Dart."

It is curious how the misadventures of Dart looked from the outside and in his own mind. Robert Broom, too carried away, wrote that “Darth made a discovery close in meaning to Darwin’s, but the English press treated him like a delinquent schoolboy ... Because the missing link became the object of a joke at that time, excavations in Africa actually stopped for 10 years."

Dart himself, however, many years later admitted that ten years of excavation was not undertaken not at all because of ridicule, but because he preferred desk studies of the microscopic structure of the nervous system to the missing link. In addition, Dart did not hide the fact that he was not up to the monkeys due to the divorce proceedings with his wife (the one who offered to send back the box with the "baby"). In the early 1930s, an outstanding prospector, a man, as if created for this business, already known to the reader, Robert Broom, took up the search in South African limestone quarries. One of the inspirers of the search was the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, General (later Field Marshal) Smuts.

As you know, this man was one of the creators of the modern racist state system in South Africa, only improved and strengthened by Malan and Verwoerd. Racism, the primordial inequality of different races, was a persistent conviction of many representatives of the South African intelligentsia. But it is amusing how Smuts and his like-minded people realized before others that it was not at all necessary to oppose excavations and arrange “monkey trials”; on the contrary, it is necessary to help scientists who are studying the most ancient past of mankind, and then properly use the results of their work, which was done, and done skillfully.

Having received a place in the Transvaal Museum, the energetic Broome immediately set to work, which, unlike Dart, considered his main one. In early 1936, two of Dart's students told Broom about interesting limestone caves near the Sterkfontein farm. Huge pits with animal bones have been known here since the end of the 19th century, and over 40 years, apparently, many fossils were mined by miners and burned in lime kilns.

In his book, Broome begins the story of subsequent events with a temperamental exaggeration: "I went and found the missing link ..."

Together with students Schepers and Le Rich, Broome came to the quarry on Sunday and descended into beautiful underground corridors with hanging stalactites. There were no workers, but Broom managed to talk to Mr. Barlow, who was looking after the mining site. Barlow told the scientists that he had previously worked at Taungs, and Broom asked if Barlow had seen skulls like those found at Taungs here at Sterkfontein. Barlow believed that he saw something similar because he was constantly collecting bones and selling them to random visitors. A few days later, Barlow offered Broom what appeared to be a fossilized tiger's paw (the object was too lime-encrusted to make out more accurately). Broom was in no hurry to acquire the bone, and by the next time it was already gone. Barlow hinted that they should take while they give, but then relented and promised to continue to watch and collect.

On Friday, August 17, 1936, Broome arrived again, and Barlow immediately handed him "a beautiful skull cap."

"Is that what you want?" - he asked.

Broom immediately guessed that he was being shown the remains of a highly developed ape, or even an ape-man. For several hours he unsuccessfully tried to find other parts of the skull in the quarry, but when he went home, he suddenly came across another fragment of an ancient skull off the side of the road. The next day, the hunt resumed: Broom, with several assistants - students and three native boys, managed to find another fragment of the skull, and in the following days - an incomplete jaw and teeth (including one wisdom tooth!).

The discovered creature was similar to the Australopithecus published by Dart, but at the same time it had such significant differences that it had to be given a different name: the Transvaal plesianthrope.

To celebrate, Broom named one of the incidentally found varieties of the saber-toothed tiger the fossil Barlow tiger. Then he packed a plesianthrope and went with him on a trip around the world.

It was just when Koenigswald produced new Pithecanthropus, and Weidenreich - Sinanthropus.

All the main characters met in 1937 at an anthropological convention in Philadelphia. It seemed that, like two groups of diggers, anthropologists broke into the human past from different sides: from the side of man (Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus) and from the side of the monkey (Australopithecine, Plesianthropus). A "meeting" of two different groups would mean, in principle, the renaming of the missing link into a missing, extracted one.

Returning to South Africa, Broome almost never left the caves and quarries, but later admitted that the first skull, found on August 17, 1936, was much better than all the numerous finds of 1937 and early 1938.

Australopithecus Darta, plesianthropus Bruma and other South African finds gradually replenished the Australopithecus family.

“I have something nice for you,” after which he took out a part of the upper jaw with the first molar. Broom exclaimed that this was indeed something wonderful, and presented the good herald with two pounds sterling. Barlow was delighted, but for some reason, after the question of where the find was made, he turned the conversation to another topic. Broom, who had already mastered the local diplomacy, pretended to be satisfied and asked no more questions. At home, examining the jaw, he realized that it belonged to a creature also close to the known Australopithecus, but much larger than the monkeys from Taungs and Sterkfontein.

Choosing a day when Barlow was not at the quarry, Broom suddenly appeared there, casually took his jaw out of his pocket and asked the native boys if something similar had come across here. The boys knew nothing, and from this Broom concluded again that the jaw had been found elsewhere. Only after this did the scientist begin the correct siege of Mr. Barlow and continue it until he achieved a recognition that the jaw was obtained from a certain schoolboy named Gert Terblanche.

When Broome arrived at the Terblanches' house, the boy was at school, but his mother and sister explained that the "place" was half a mile from the house and that Gert had taken "four magnificent teeth" dug "on the spot" with him to school. Broom put the girl in the car, rushed "to the place" and immediately found several fragments of the skull and a couple of teeth in a few minutes. Then the car sped towards the school, broke down on the way, and the anthropologist, on foot, luckily showed up during the big recess.

Geert Terblanche, quickly realizing what Broom wanted from him, "produced four of the most remarkable teeth ever seen in the history of the world." The scientist quickly acquired teeth, tried them on the jaw received from Barlow, and experienced great joy, as everything came together.

Broom really needed a boy for a detailed conversation, but the classes ended only after 2 hours, and then, to the delight of four teachers and 120 children, instead of the remaining lessons, the anthropologist gave an impromptu report on caves, quarries, hiding places, fossil bones and similar things, wonderful even without not answering lessons in two subjects for their sake. When the scientist had finished, class time was up, and Gert led a whole army to the place where Broom had already visited, opened his hiding place and pulled out another "beautiful lower jaw with two teeth."

For a few days on this hill, near l farm Kromdraa, Broome "collected" almost a whole, very powerful australopithecine, similar and at the same time very different from the previous two. He was awarded the title of "paran-trope robustus" ("powerful"). The ending "anthrope" suggested that Broom considered the creature more like a man than an ape. However, in his book, the scientist apologizes and declares that he is not involved in the title under which the message about the find appeared in the Illustrated London News. The title was: "The missing link is no longer missing!"

More and more discoveries followed. They were already losing the charm of novelty, but each provided enormous material for reflection on the fate of the human race.

Broom and his assistant Robinson, and then again Dart, who did not sit in the office, every year mined white-coated petrified bones that had lain motionless for thousands of centuries, but would inevitably have fallen into a lime kiln if not for a missing link.

The action of Faulkner's brilliant trilogy ("Village", "City", "Mansion") takes place in one of the southern states, in the fictional district of Yoknapatofa. This unpronounceable name was left from the Indians who once owned these lands. Yoknapatofa sounds like an Indian call, similar to "tomahawk". In this word, wildness, antiquity, recollection of another civilization. In combination with Yoknapatofa, the words “governor”, ​​“bank”, “sheriff” sound strange. Faulkner, of course, did not accidentally combine such different things. This is a kind of symbolism - everything is intertwined, nothing has changed: modernity, in which scalping takes place without the help of a lasso, tomahawks, but with such much more powerful weapons as a bill, mortgage, judicial investigation, constitution.

Strangely intertwined with modern scientific problems are the sonorous multilingual names of South Africa.

Stray, British-Taungs.

Heavy, Old Dutch - Sterkfontein, Swortkrans.

Bizarre, Negro-Kromdraa, Makapansgat...

Three language layers - the memory of two conquests, of that bloody tragedy that has been going on in South Africa for more than a century, as if asking for a sad epilogue of that world drama that began here in time immemorial.

When Dart descended into the gloomy, winding corridors of the Makapansgat cave, he discovered ancient traces of fire and believed that he had discovered those who played the role of Prometheus for humanity, bringing the flame. The bones of a new australopithecine found later gave rise to the name Australopithecus Promethene.

But in the same cave, Dart also found relatively fresh bones - a memory of the desperate, hopeless 25-day resistance of the rebellious natives against the Transvaal army in the 19th century.

A mixture of bestial and civilized, the latest science with the oldest prejudices, Yoknapatofy with refrigerators and machine guns - all this is present when getting acquainted with the great South African anthropological discoveries.

Such contradictions were bizarrely combined, for example, in the late Robert Broom. I cannot judge with sufficient completeness about the views of this man, but still I have at my disposal his own works and the memoirs of his contemporaries.

Perhaps among the readers of this book there will be those who suggest that scientists are divided into hard-nosed Darwinists and bloodthirsty racists. How simple and understandable everything would be if the scientific world consisted only of these two tribes!

But the world, unfortunately, or, conversely, fortunately, is extremely complex. In addition to the two poles, "the brotherhood of all, regardless of skin color" and "beat, cut, do not allow another color!" - in addition to the two poles, there are also such geographical latitudes:

Oh, I understand, you need equality, but still I do not like these blacks!

Okay, but would you marry your daughter to a Negro?

You know, in the end, these colored people are largely to blame...

Dr. Robert Broom was obviously much thinner, smarter and, perhaps, better than all those listed. “The brilliant scientist of South Africa, an original mind, always ready for controversy,” is how another remarkable scientist, Ralph Koenigswald, speaks of Bruma.

Robert Broom himself tells with a smile, for example, the following episode: in May 1947, in the already well-known Sterkfontein "deposit", he made a remarkable and spectacular discovery - a whole Australopithecus skull, split in two, so that each half was interspersed in a lime wall and it was possible, without touching the finds, look into the brain cavity, framed by small calcareous crystals. "I have seen many amusing things in my long life," Broom writes, "but this was the most startling observation I ever made."

The discovery was described in the newspapers, and a few days later the pastor appeared at the quarry and entered into a conversation with Daniel, Broom's native assistant. The pastor asked if it was true that a whole skull had been found. Daniel replied, "Oh yes, I can show you the pictures." The pastor looked at the photo and said that he still did not believe in a fossil ape close to humans. "I fear," Broom writes, "that Daniel's opinion of this pastor was not very high." The scientist explains at the same time that Daniel served in the Transvaal Museum for about twenty years, made a lot of finds in caves and as a fossil hunter "was worth its weight in gold."

All these reasonable statements and positive features of the scientist, however, happily coexisted with others.

It seems strange how such a prominent specialist can sympathetically quote Wallace's reflections (1869) on the mystery of the origin of man, confirmed by the fact that, for example, the Andamanese and Australians are not much higher than monkeys, and differ little from civilized people in physical structure and brain volume. .

I am convinced that it cost nothing to Brum to cite thousands of facts proving the incredibly complex, very lofty thinking and behavior of the most backward tribes immeasurably far from monkeys. Their language, hunting skills, peculiar art - isn't that enough? If Broom wanted to say that people with different mental abilities still have the same complex structure of the body and brain, then, rather than comparing whites with Andamanese, wouldn’t it be better to compare a stupid white with a smart white, a brilliant black with a stupid black, a talented Australian with the untalented?

What is allowed to the layman is not allowed to the specialist. The layman does not know and does not want to know. The specialist knows and wants or does not want to remember. Hidden deep in the soul, the "tumor of racism" comes out, gives metastases.

But it's time to return to the South African limestone caves.

There was a period, 10-20 years ago, when Australopithecus were, one might say, in their prime. Broom, Dart, then their young followers - Robinson, Tobias - every year looked for more and more new representatives of this most interesting group. Soon their number exceeded 100 and was divided into five, maybe six species (from small "babies from Taungs" to powerful paranthropes).

Paranthropus

After Sinanthropus, so many "ancestors" have never been discovered at once in one geographical area. Their shares, as representatives of the missing link, stood high: according to the calculations of the discoverers themselves, their Australopithecus lived a million years ago even earlier, that is, long before the Pithecanthropes. The brains of the first South Africans were estimated at 600-800 cubic centimeters: larger than those of monkeys, and quite close to pithecanthropes. Dart then reported on Ash, the ancient fire of Australopithecus Prometheus.

Finally, remarkable photographs appeared in the scientific press: the same aged but restless Raymond Dart made a whole series of finds in Makapansgat. The main sensation was the skulls of baboons, pierced by a powerful blow to the left temple. One did not have to have forensic talents to understand: the monkeys met death by throwing themselves at the pursuing enemy, and received a fatal blow from the left, that is, obviously, inflicted by the right hand of the attacker. The smashing hand proved that the pursuer was running on two legs; hips and other bones have also repeatedly confirmed the bipedality of Australopithecus.

But what was in the right hand of the smashing Prometheus?

Dart collected, counted, measured hundreds of bones that were in the cave, and came to the bold conclusion: the ends of some bull bones are flattened. In addition, the break in the baboon's temple surprisingly exactly coincided with the "shock platform" of the bone lying nearby.

It was not surprising to get excited: Dart called the civilization of Australopithecus the culture of bone, tooth and horn.

It turned out that in ancient times here, in the deserts and semi-deserts of South Africa, smart apes, feeling need and hunger, having lost saving trees, not having strong enough fangs and claws, stood up in horror on their hind legs, grabbed in the front "the first objects that came across ”, which, naturally, could become the bones of eaten animals, and went to people.

Since an antelope, a bull, a hyena can only be caught and defeated by a group of Australopithecus, we are sure that they had packs, communities, the germ of human society. And one can already imagine how they rush with long bones in their hands along the dull African plains, surrounding baboons.

But it wasn't long before Dart's excellent theory wavered and cracked under intense fire of criticism and doubt.

As for guns and fire, at first a speculative distrust arose: these Australopithecus are too monkeys to be a man, an Australoanthrope. Broom believed that the ashes in the cave were a trace of a steppe fire, other experts found that the bones of antelopes and other large animals could hardly be leftovers from the Australopithecus table and rather resembled the remains of a feast of hyenas or other predators.

Did a hungry smart monkey appear to finish eating after predators; By the way, the study of Australopithecus teeth increasingly spoke of their predilection for plant foods.

The authority of the "southern monkeys" was undermined from different sides. Precise calculations made from many skulls have thrown out the large brain hypothesis. 520 cubic centimeters - that's what its average volume is (from 335 to 600). This is no more than that of a gorilla, although it should be borne in mind that Australopithecus is much smaller, and therefore, in terms of body weight, they were more brainy than modern great apes.

In 1949, Broom's assistant Robinson led a successful excavation in the Swartcrans cave, already known for several finds, extracting the skulls and jaws of large Paranthropus. Suddenly, in one of the "nests" a jaw was seen, incomparably more human than anything that has been found so far. By all indications, this was already a primitive man, corresponding to Pithecanthropus in teeth and brain size.

"The Cape Telanthrope of Brum and Robinson" was the name given to this new member of the honorary family of early men. Appearing, he immediately aroused new thoughts: apparently, he lived at the same time as the Australopithecus, and the abundance of Australopithecus bones in the same cave may have been the result of breakfasts, lunches, afternoon snacks and dinners of the African Pithecanthropus.

By this time, the antiquity of Australopithecus, which initially seemed very large, had greatly decreased. By counting the bones of wild animals that accompanied Australopithecus, experts calculated that the oldest two-legged monkeys from Sterkfontein are no more than a million years old, and the youngest (Kromdraa) are no less than five hundred thousand. 500 thousand - a million years, the time of the Australopithecus. But this is also the time of their civilized contemporary, the telanthrope. This is also the time of the Javanese pithecanthropes!

And then a different panorama of human history began to emerge.

If Australopithecus and Pithecanthropus lived at the same time, then probably the latter could not have descended from the former. The wise Pithecanthropus was terrible and invincible for an Australopithecus, even a two-legged one who took a bone in his hand. “Australopithecine is a bad student. He is stuck on the school bench of life,” writes Koenigswald.

But the desire, albeit unfulfilled, of the Australopithecus to humanize, undoubtedly, was. If they had not been interfered with, then now, in our days, they might have reached the Neanderthal level. And yet, they might not have achieved it. Specialized teeth of Australopithecus - was it not here that his death lurked? Specialization is fraught with convenience and death.

One way or another, but as we see, even a hundred Australopithecus together could not answer the question about the missing link.

The missing link is not the South African Australopithecus. It was before, before: a certain mysterious "x-pithek" somewhere and sometime turned into an "anthropic player".

The ausgralopithecus must have found their end in South Africa, because it is a dead end and there is nowhere else to go but two oceans. Koenigswald writes about the last Australopithecus: "Emigrants with a low forehead and large teeth, they must have taken Pithecanthropus for a genius, and Sinanthropus for a superman."

But they could only get to the South African dead end from Central and East Africa. This means that the main events that took place earlier than a million years ago, the prologue of our entire history - the history of the missing link - should have been sought not in the quarries and caves of the south, but in the center, on the equatorial belt of the Black Continent.

Going upstream of the Australopithecus tragedy, science approached the title and the first scenes of the gigantic dramatic cycle, colloquially referred to as human history.

My previous experience with the creations of the Belgian animator Pisch was not the most successful for me - the cartoon "Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle" turned out to be vulgar, excessively sexually preoccupied, although in some places not devoid of irony and a sense of style, a Freudian anecdote, which I should review I have no desire yet. This is where I would stop my acquaintance with the work of this erotomaniac cartoonist, widely known in narrow circles, but, as it turned out, his next cartoon, The Missing Link, was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. And guys, they don’t just nominate for such a prestigious award. It must be deserved. Anticipating something bad, I still found the film.

As it turned out, Pisha did a good job of correcting the mistakes and bungled the movie, which I really liked, being really far from an ordinary cartoon, showing the great talent of the director and an excellent sense of humor, which was fully manifested here, allowing you to forget about "Tarzun" as a the notorious "first pancake".

Let's start, of course, with the name. Russian pirates at the dawn of the video boom, as always, were original, renaming the harmless "Missing Link" into a completely meaningless "World History of Sex" in the context of the plot, apparently starting from Mel Brooks' "World History" similar to this cartoon. Well, so that more fans of all kinds of stupid porn cartoons buy this product, in which sex, by the way, is briefly mentioned in two episodes in an extremely mocking manner. By comparison, even "Tarzun" was much more preoccupied and nymphomaniac.

The "Missing Link" tells the story of a primitive man, a kind of "Prometheus involuntarily", expelled from a tribe of savages for his extremely small hairiness and too good-natured physiognomy. A newborn man makes a long journey across the Earth in search of his own kind, finding friends exclusively in the animal kingdom, much more humane and interesting than his relatives. Having bypassed the Earth, a person who has learned a lot again finds himself in his tribe, where he unsuccessfully tries to teach the uncouth fellow tribesmen, who have not grown at all spiritually, the skills of civilization, instead generating only a wave of indignation, hatred and almost a world war. And in the end, he remains completely alone, not counting his friends - the pterodactyl and the brontosaurus, who turned out to be much wiser, kinder and more honest than the so-called people.

The philosophy of the "Missing Link" is quite consistent with the hippie philosophy of the generation of "flower children", to which Pischa himself belongs. His sixties sentiments fully made themselves felt in this film, which overcame the temptation to make fun of the viewer's sexual complexes and too primitive slogans of "free love". Unlike "Tarzun", the character named "O" does not seek love or pleasure, although he knows them as part of the world around him. He is in a desperate search for himself, trying to identify his Self with a variety of life forms, but he still cannot answer the question of who he is and why he was born. Pisha paints a portrait of a society that rejects anyone who is not able to meet its standards and renegades, who in the end either return to the herd, admitting defeat, or, after many years of searching, remain alone with themselves, never finding harmony in an aggressive and soulless world, looped on grub, hoarding and pleasure.

"People" who understand only the language of violence reject "O" who seeks to teach them a higher level of organization and reconcile with nature. Also rejected by their brothers, the brontosaurus and pterodactyl find themselves in the same company with him, and they are all doomed to extinction in this world split into continents, inflamed by the frenzy of wars and cataclysms.

The pessimistic Pisha, however, has too good a sense of humor for a film with such a satirical and by no means harmless coloring to be boring or offensive. A cascade of funny situations that the hero finds himself in, irony in relation to the primitive world, in some ways really similar to World History, numerous quotes from various films and books, references to various epochal events, a dynamic narrative, and simply a stylization of prehistoric time worthy of all praise. Not limited, like the creators of The Land Before Time, by the opinions of scientific consultants, Pisha fantasized to his heart's content, creating many amazing creatures, funny and ridiculous, in many of which he transferred quite real characters and entire social groups.

So, in a number of episodes, the life of ants is shown, debugged and clearly organized, like a well-functioning mechanism. In this anthill, modern Japan is clearly visible, in which, with elements of a parody of Gulliver and King Kong, the protagonist brings confusion. In the finale, the anthill is drowned by a sudden tsunami. And the tribe of “nova” builders-enthusiasts, to whom “O” at first tries to cling to, who grow corn in the desert and look alike like two drops of water, speaking in chorus and continuing their useless work with maniacal persistence, resembles the communists, whom then many very sympathetic in French-speaking countries. And the leader of the “people” tribe, blockhead “A” in one moment turns into ... Hitler and sends his imbeciles to a bloody primitive war, even more ridiculous because of the primitive dictator’s explanations: “people - yes! Nova - no!

The impression is somewhat spoiled only by the episodes of the birth of “O” that fall out of the general style, in which the humor is already very salty, and the taste that changes the director a couple of times makes itself felt. But in the American version, which I watched, the voice of one of the characters belongs to Bill Murray. And I immediately recognized this voice, despite the Russian voice acting superimposed on top. The character is funny and Murray "plays" him very well.

Pisha knowingly spent 4 years of work on this film. He has grown a lot since his debut and has shown himself to be a socially oriented adult original artist with his own view of the world and problems, which he tries to convey to the best of his ability and in his recognizable style to the public. Therefore, success in Cannes was in this case fully justified. The film is not stupid, the stylization is interesting, the characters are recognizable, the context touches, the story is instructive. Now I have to find out whether The Missing Link was a single burst of creative inspiration, an unplanned masterpiece, or a pattern, the result of an evolving and growing talent of an artist who works hard on himself.

Approximately 13,000 years ago, a group of inhabitants of Siberia (which archaeologists would later call the Clovis culture) suddenly noticed that they lived somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in some kind of Siberia. They got together and, in search of a better life, embarked on a grueling mass migration through the future Bering Strait, which at that time was a land bridge to an uninhabited continent. Having successfully completed their dangerous journey, they dispersed throughout the earth. Over time, they created tribes and nations, becoming the true indigenous people of the continent and basically lived happily ever after.

Archaeological evidence against the "Clovis First" theory accumulates on a weekly basis. Take Monte Verde, a 15,000-year-old Stone Age site in southern Chile, which shows that the area was inhabited nearly a thousand years before the Bering Bridge ice sheet receded enough for humans to cross the area. Or the Paisley caves, where scientists have found tools that date back hundreds of years before the Clovis people and are of a completely different design.

In fact, all assumptions about the settlement of America by one cultural group from Siberia are more or less based on the distinctive Clovis stabbing tools found in a city in New Mexico called Clovis (archaeologists are not particularly resourceful when it comes to naming things) . The strange thing is that the researchers did not find any connection between the tools of the ancient Siberians and the Clovis people. In fact, the oldest Clovis instruments were found on the east coast of the United States, not in the west, as you would expect from people who came from Siberia.

However, the instruments bore a striking resemblance to those made by a group called the Solutre, a European tribe that lived in Spain and southern France. According to Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution, the Solutra may have managed to reach America over the Atlantic coast ice sheet 22,000 years ago, and thus have a huge head start in settling the continents. We actually like this theory, if only because it could bring an interesting twist to the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire: they were raiding their own people.

Missing link still not found

The riddle of human evolution is tragically incomplete: One giant, oddly Chewbacca-like element is missing. This compromise hybrid between ape and man has been dubbed the "missing link" and has become a hot topic in evolutionary debate.

Science's failure to find the missing link has led to all sorts of crazy theories from Bigfoot Madness to the creationist claims that the absence of this man-ape somehow completely disproves the theory of evolution.

• Reality:

There are a huge number of missing links. We have already found a whole bunch, and over time there are more and more of them.

Here's how it works: Look at the image below. At what exact point does a color stop being completely red and become completely blue?

Of course, it's impossible to find the actual change point. So it is with evolution: it was gradual. People tend to think that evolution jumps from one stage to the next in giant leaps, in the "March of Progress" style. But the process is actually much less spectacular. Our journey from a drop of primordial dirt to humans was long and slow, and even the changes that included the ape-human hybrid were decidedly undramatic because they were almost indistinguishable from the stages we already know about.

Now a major theme in the missing link game is the hybrid between two apes, the ape-like australopithecine. and the more human-like Homo Habilis he eventually evolved into. A version of the mentioned missing link was found in 2010. Another variation on this theme appeared in 2013 in the form of some hybrid ear bones. These hybrid discoveries are known as transitional fossils and more are being found. And since the tree of human evolution hides many transitions, everything to which they can even remotely be connected (and usually they are) is presented as a "missing link." It seems that the true missing link lies in the ability of the average person to understand how evolution works.