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 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.