Frederic Wood Jones

A friend of Le Gros Clark, Wood Jones was also known for his controversial belief in the view that acquired traits could be inherited, and thus his opposition to Darwinism.

[12] "Wood Jones, prior to the 1930s, promoted that the human line evolved from a very generalized primate from which avoided going through a hominoid ape stage.

He believed that science should search as far back as the primitive tarsioid stock to find a sufficiently generalised form that would be the common ancestor of man, monkeys and the anthropoid apes.

The tarsian hypothesis of Jones, which he held to from 1918[14] until his death, claimed that the human line of development did not diverge from that of apes or monkeys but from much earlier, before the Oligocene 30 million years ago, from a common ancestor with a primitive primate group of which the only other survivor is the Tarsier.

In 1948 he wrote: "If the primate forms immediately ancestral to the human stock are ever to be revealed, they will be utterly unlike the slouching ‘ape men’ of which some have dreamed and of which they have made casts and pictures during their waking hours.