page_title: Man's Place in Nature
section_title: Precursors of the idea
hierarchical_section_title: Man's Place in Nature / Precursors of the idea
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration comparing the skeletons of various apes to that of man Deutsch: Illustration Vergleich der Skelette von verschiedenen Affen mit dem des Menschen
context_page_description: Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature is an 1863 book by Thomas Henry Huxley, in which he gives evidence for the evolution of man and apes from a common ancestor. It was the first book devoted to the topic of human evolution, and discussed much of the anatomical and other evidence. Backed by this evidence, the book proposed to a wide readership that evolution applied as fully to man as to all other life.
context_section_description: In the 18th century Linnaeus and others had classified man as a primate, but without drawing evolutionary conclusions. It was Lamarck, the first to develop a coherent theory of evolution, who discussed human evolution in this context. Robert Chambers in his anonymous Vestiges also clearly made the point.
  The book came five years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announced their theory of evolution by means of natural selection, and four years after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. In the Origin Darwin had deliberately avoided tackling human evolution, but left a gnomic trailer: "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history". Darwin's sequel came eight years later, with The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).
caption: This illustration was the frontispiece. Huxley applied Darwin's ideas to humans, using comparative anatomy to show that humans and apes had a common ancestor, which challenged the theologically important idea that humans held a unique place in the universe.[1] The drawing, like The March of Progress a century later, is arranged to support the now-discredited idea that evolution is progress toward a goal.[2]
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