Chương Chương 2 · 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.

[Illustration: THE GROWTH OF THE HUMAN SKULL]

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.

[Illustration: PREHISTORY AND HISTORY]

Like many of the animals who fill the Zoo with their strange noises,

early man liked to jabber. That is to say, he endlessly repeated the

same unintelligible gibberish because it pleased him to hear the sound

of his voice. In due time he learned that he could use this guttural

noise to warn his fellow beings whenever danger threatened and he gave

certain little shrieks which came to mean “there is a tiger!” or “here

come five elephants.” Then the others grunted something back at him and

their growl meant, “I see them,” or “let us run away and hide.” And

this was probably the origin of all language.

But, as I have said before, of these beginnings we know so very little.

Early man had no tools and he built himself no houses. He lived and

died and left no trace of his existence except a few collar-bones and

a few pieces of his skull. These tell us that many thousands of years

ago the world was inhabited by certain mammals who were quite different

from all the other animals—who had probably developed from another

unknown ape-like animal which had learned to walk on its hind-legs and

use its fore-paws as hands—and who were most probably connected with

the creatures who happen to be our own immediate ancestors.

It is little enough we know and the rest is darkness.