When I don't know what else to write about, I usually pick a phrase off the top of my head into Google Books and see what turns up. Today I chose "ape-man," and the usual parade of popular books and scientific articles showed up. I was looking for something a bit different, though, and the title Woman Triumphant: The Story of Her Struggles for Freedom, Education and Political Rights caught my eye. What would such a book have to say about "ape-men"?
The reference to early human ancestors in Woman Triumphant is fleeting, and fairly typical for a popular book. The author, Rudolf Cronau, wrote;
In physical appearance primeval men were far from resembling those ideal figures of Adam and Eve, pictured by mediaeval artists who strove to give an idea of the glories of our lost Paradise. While these products of imagination can claim no greater authenticity than the illustrations to other fairy tales, we nevertheless owe to the diligent works of able scientists restorations of the figures of primeval men. These deserve full credit, as they are based on skeletons and bones, found in caves, which some hundred thousand years ago were inhabited by human-like beings. From such remains it appears that our predecessors were near relatives to the so-called man-apes, the orang outang, chimpanzee, gibbon, and gorilla. Ages passed before these ape-men, in the slow course of evolution, developed into man, distinctly human, though still on a far lower level than any savage people of to-day.
An illustration (see above) was included with this description. Illustrations of ancient humans were often directed by the evolutionary hypotheses of the artist (or the person directing the artist). Depictions of Neanderthals, for instance, ranged from making them look only slightly different from us to illustrating them as aberrant, angry gorillas. The illustration of the hypothetical hominid in Woman Triumphant falls somewhat in between, a mish-mash of "ape" and "human" features, but the aspect that particularly struck me was the feet.
The "ape-man" in the illustration is walking bipedally (albeit with a horribly slouched posture), but the feet appear to be intermediate of those seen in our species and living apes. The big toe is slightly divergent but is not shunted all the way off to the side, and this reminded me of the famous Laetoli tracks likely made by Australopithecus.
Woman Triumphant was published in 1919, fifty seven years before the Laetoli tracks were discovered. This is interesting, as it seems that the slightly divergent toe possessed by the "ape-man" in the book was an expected transitional feature. It would be too much of a stretch to call the illustration a scientific hypothesis, but it is still provides an interesting coincidence given what we presently know.
[I expect that this illustration is not the only one to depict such a condition of the foot, and I intend to do some more digging to see if any naturalists expected our earlier ancestors to possess a slightly divergent big toe at some point.]
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I admit it: when I saw the reconstruction of the Laetoli tracks in the AMNH, I teared up. Just look at it from their perspective: their whole world had just been destroyed by a frakking volcano!
I can't say I've teared up, Blake, but it's compelling to imagine a pair of Australopithecus (and maybe even a little one) trudging through the ash, flakes of it still falling from the darkened sky. A lot is made over whether the pair were holding hands or some such thing, but that, to me, is not as powerful as the environmental context of what happened. As I've written elsewhere (and I'm not the first), tracks are fossil behavior, and it's moving to think about what was happening when these tracks were made.