Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (London: Williams & Norgate, 1864)
Vet.Biol.20
The pedestal that raised humans above all other animals is crumbling
Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, first published in his On the Origin of Species (1859), raised the inevitable question of where humans stand in relation to other living beings. Using comparative anatomy, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) spoke in favour of humans and apes sharing a common ancestor in his seminal Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), of which St John’s holds a later imprint from 1864. The book is split into three chapters, the first focusing on the anatomy of apes and the second comparing human anatomy to ‘the lower animals’ before discussing
human fossil remains. Laid out in the second chapter is the key argument ‘that there were more anatomical similarities between modern humans and the chimpanzee and gorilla (bonobos were
not recognized then) than there were between the two African apes and the rest of the primates,
including the orangutan’ (Wood, p. 18).
Three years earlier, on 30 June 1860, Huxley had famously debated the Bishop of Winchester, Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873), on the question of human evolution at Oxford’s Natural History Museum. While Wilberforce’s quip whether Huxley thought to be descended from a monkey on his grandfathers or grandmother’s side is arguably the best remembered line (if it had indeed been delivered like that), the debate was won by Huxley and the theory of evolution – not only in hindsight.
The frontispiece of Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature will look familiar to many people, especially at first sight. The iconic illustration ‘The March of Progress’, first published a hundred years later in 1965, has become an ‘instantly recognisable visual shorthand for evolution’ (Tucker). Yet, the 1863/4 frontispiece is a simple comparison of the skeletons of apes and humans. The left to right sequence is irrelevant here and does not display an evolutionary progress from ape to human.