ABSTRACT
When the human being began to establish itself as a species of its own, detaching itself from the other quadrumanes, the world knew none of the species of apes we know today. It could hardly have been otherwise. How could evolution have been forced to pursue so many by-ways on the road to man, the horse and the rattlesnake while not with the chimpanzee or gorilla? At the time of our beginnings, the apes which now are our closest animal relatives were likewise enclosed in forms quite different from those one sees today. Yet, no one who studies the distant human past can resist the temptation of viewing the great man-apes as a possible point of orientation. The greatest of the great apes (the pongids: orangutan, chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla) could easily have grown extinct in the course of the twentieth century, and their disappearance would hardly have ranked as a cause for general dismay. They owe their exiguous survival to our own ferocious curiosity-here in the Western world-about the origins of the human being. As living fossils of prehuman beings, they have received a further lease on life so as better to allow us post-animals to experience the excitement of a mirror in which to view ourselves.
