How human-like apes spurred theory of evolution

In 1838, orangutans were still frighteningly unfamiliar to Europeans. In fact, all the great apes were a mystery because they lived thousands of miles away, deep inside African and Asian jungles. Early European explorers would report encounters with fierce, human-like creatures, usually told second-hand. In the early 1600s, a Dutch physician named Jacobus Bontius who lived on the island of Java wrote of wild apes there called “Ourang Outang,” meaning “man of the forest.” The picture that accompanied his description looks like a woman with a lion’s mane.

Bontius’s name for these creatures stuck. In fact, seventeenth century naturalists came to use “Orang-Outang” to refer to any ape, even a chimpanzee. Over the next two centuries, some dead orang-outangs made their way to the anatomical labs of Europe, and a few live ones made it to zoos. They were juveniles, often taken from their mothers, and they didn’t last long in captivity before dying of diseases. Baby orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas all looked a lot more alike than mature individuals, and so they all continued to be called orang-outangs.

Not only were they similar to each other, but they were disconcertingly similar to humans. Some naturalists responded to this realization by placing apes just below humans on the Great Chain of Being, a kind of divine ladder that separated species on different rungs from lower to higher forms. Linnaeus, on the other hand, put orangutans and other apes in the same genus as humans. Rousseau even wondered if they were “a race of genuine wild men.” Even more scandalously, Lamarck proposed that orangutans were the ancestors of humans.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: When Darwin Met Another Ape

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