The Story of Mankind [6]
your daily companions in the streets and in your home, and you
can see your less familiar cousins behind the bars of the zoological
garden.
And now we come to the parting of the ways when man
suddenly leaves the endless procession of dumbly living and
dying creatures and begins to use his reason to shape the
destiny of his race.
One mammal in particular seemed to surpass all others in
its ability to find food and shelter. It had learned to use its
fore-feet for the purpose of holding its prey, and by dint of
practice it had developed a hand-like claw. After innumerable
attempts it had learned how to balance the whole of the
body upon the hind legs. (This is a difficult act, which every
child has to learn anew although the human race has been
doing it for over a million years.)
This creature, half ape and half monkey but superior to
both, became the most successful hunter and could make a
living in every clime. For greater safety, it usually moved
about in groups. It learned how to make strange grunts to
warn its young of approaching danger and after many hundreds
of thousands of years it began to use these throaty noises
for the purpose of talking.
This creature, though you may hardly believe it, was your
first ``man-like'' ancestor.
OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS
WE know very little about the first ``true'' men. We have
never seen their pictures. In the deepest layer of clay of an
ancient soil we have sometimes found pieces of their bones.
These lay buried amidst the broken skeletons of other animals
that have long since disappeared from the face of the earth.
Anthropologists (learned scientists who devote their lives to
the study of man as a member of the animal kingdom) have
taken these bones and they have been able to reconstruct our
earliest ancestors with a fair degree of accuracy.
The great-great-grandfather of the human race was a very
ugly and unattractive mammal. He was quite small, much
smaller than the people of today. The heat of the sun and the
biting wind of the cold winter had coloured his skin a dark
brown. His head and most of his body, his arms and legs too,
were covered with long, coarse hair. He had very thin but
strong fingers which made his hands look like those of a monkey.
His forehead was low and his jaw was like the jaw of a
wild animal which uses its teeth both as fork and knife. He
wore no clothes. He had seen no fire except the flames of the
rumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with their smoke
and their lava.
He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests, as the
pygmies of Africa do to this very day. When he felt the
pangs of hunger he ate raw leaves and the roots of plants or
he took the eggs away from an angry bird and fed them to his
own young. Once in a while, after a long and patient chase,
he would catch a sparrow or a small wild dog or perhaps a
rabbit. These he would eat raw for he had never discovered
that food tasted better when it was cooked.
During the hours of day, this primitive human being
prowled about looking for things to eat.
When night descended upon the earth, he hid his wife and
his children in a hollow tree or behind some heavy boulders,
for he was surrounded on all sides by ferocious animals and
when it was dark these animals began to prowl about, looking
for something to eat for their mates and their own young, and
they liked the taste of human beings. It was a world where
you must either eat or be eaten, and life was very unhappy
because it was full of fear and misery.
In summer, man was exposed to the scorching rays of the
sun, and during the winter his children would freeze to death
in his arms. When such a creature hurt itself, (and hunting
animals are forever breaking their bones or spraining their
ankles) he had no one to take care of him and he must die a
horrible death.
Like many of the animals