ABSTRACT
Primates are comparatively rare in the Pleistocene of Europe. Most of the fossils belong to the hominid family, and if one includes the artifacts of man, especially the stone tools, man may be regarded as the commonest primate of this period. Other fossil primates include only two or three types of monkeys whose range intermittently extended to Europe. The cercopithecids are the only non-human primates known in Europe in the Pleistocene. In Tertiary times apes of the genus Dryopithecus lived there, but they were gone before the beginning of the Villafranchian. The Florentine macaque is probably the direct ancestor of the living Gibraltar 'ape'. The earliest known members of human own zoological family date from the Miocene of India and Africa and belong to the genus Ramapithecus. Their evolutionary level was that of the apes, but their teeth were human. The oldest human fossil in Europe comes from the C-Cromer interglacial sands of Mauer.
