Headscratchers / The Lost World (1912)

• What are those apemen doing there in South America ? About dinosaurs, okay, Artistic License and Science Marches On combined can justify even the most egregious. But I don't think it was ever seriously believed in Doyles's times that mankind originated in South America. So… ?
  • They could be New World Monkeys who became humanoid via convergent evolution.
  • It's a Land That Time Forgot. They're most likely just prehistoric precursors to humanity who got trapped and isolated from the rest of the world in much the same way that the dinosaurs and such did as well. Doyle's probably not intending to suggest that humanity began in South America, he's just suggesting that those particular prehistoric pre-humans were stuck there as well.
  • Doyle's setting his dinosaur story in South America, but he wants prehistoric cavemen there as well. So, he fudges it so that the Lost World has dinosaurs and cavemen. It's an adventure story, not a paleontological lecture, so like many a writer before and after him he assumes his characters getting into all sorts of exciting scrapes with dinosaurs and cavemen will overcome any qualms the reader might have about the precise origins of humanity. In other words, Rule of Cool.
  • Mankind heterogenesis was a very popular idea at the time amongst white supremacists, see the Loys ape hoax. Fawcett, Doyle's informant on South America, also claimed to have encountered a tribe of apelike men in the Matto Grosso, so in they went to the book.
  • On the cryptzoological sides of things, ape-men have been reported in places other than Africa, even in South America.
• A minor one, but why do Challenger and Summerlee even need to debate whether the pterosaurs the party encounters are Pterodactylus or Dimorphodon? You'd think if Conan Doyle did enough research to know what a Dimorphodon is he'd also know that it looked nothing like a pterodactyl, since the physical differences between the two genera were well-known even in 1912. Even given the inherent difficulties of classifying a living animal based only on fossil remains, two men who we're meant to understand are palaeontology experts shouldn't be having that amount of trouble.
  • They're two stubborn old rivals who are set in their ways and take any opportunity to disagree with each other for most of the book. So if one says it's Pterodactylus, the other's going to proclaim it a Dimorphodon in part just to be contrary, and whichever one is wrong isn't going to back down because then they'd lose face in front of someone who'd never let them hear the end of it. They'd probably argue about whether or not the sky was blue if you gave them half a chance.
  • Also to be entirely fair, in context they're arguing about which prehistoric flying reptile has just swooped and attacked them. There's being able to clearly delineate between one animal and another when you're studying long-dead fossil records or an artistic reproduction, and then there's being able to clearly distinguish between the two when one of them is not only very much alive but is trying to take a bite out of you. Under that circumstance, there'd be a lot of motion and confusion, one or both wouldn't be looking at it very closely because they'd be moving quickly to get out of its way, and details would get muddled. Most likely, one of them thought it was one type in the heat of the moment as he was trying to avoid getting gouged or bitten, the other (possibly) got a clearer look and realised / thought it was the other kind, when the dust settled one pronounced it to be one kind of animal, the other made his disagreement / correction known rather high-handedly, the former got annoyed and dug his heels in, and, well, see the previous point for what happens next.