Raymond Pearl had a particular interest in problems relative to man as a creature who is now beginning to crowd the world with his numbers, and such factors as fertility and longevity especially concerned him. The list of the more strictly physical anthropologist, Ashley Montagu, reflects his interest in total anatomy. The list proposed by Huxley begins to place more emphasis upon the cultural aspects of manhood. It was not that Huxley was disinterested in physical anthropology, for he did draw up a table of comparative bone lengths for man and the manlike apes, with the intention of showing that man falls within the range of these apes and to demonstrate that the apes often differ more from one another than some one of them differed from man. His table is shown below.
Asterisks mark minimum values, bold face maximum.
If such a relationship held for all or most traits, it would tend to suggest that man should be classified in the group of the apes rather than alongside of it, much as the reconstructed family trees have already suggested. However, what Huxley in the ardor of his argument did not note is that, in the proportions cited, man is regularly at one end of the ape scale at either the maximum or the minimum of the joint range. This gives us pause, because it seems to suggest that man does after all stand off on one side by himself. The long bones of the lower limb, especially the thigh bone, are longer in man than the long bones of the upper limb, especially the humerus, while in anthropoids the conditions are reversed. It is this fact which makes the gait of man attempting to walk on all fours so completely different from that of other animals.