The Story of Mankind | Page 8

it was due to a sudden
change in climate. Perhaps they had grown so large that they could
neither swim nor walk nor crawl, and they starved to death within sight
but not within reach of the big ferns and trees. Whatever the cause, the
million year old world-empire of the big reptiles was over.
The world now began to be occupied by very different creatures. They
were the descendants of the reptiles but they were quite unlike these
because they fed their young from the ``mammae'' or the breasts of the
mother. Wherefore modern science calls these animals ``mammals.''
They had shed the scales of the fish. They did not adopt the feathers of
the bird, but they covered their bodies with hair. The mammals
however developed other habits which gave their race a great
advantage over the other animals. The female of the species carried the
eggs of the young inside her body until they were hatched and while all
other living beings, up to that time, had left their children exposed to
the dangers of cold and heat, and the attacks of wild beasts, the
mammals kept their young with them for a long time and sheltered
them while they were still too weak to fight their enemies. In this way

the young mammals were given a much better chance to survive,
because they learned many things from their mothers, as you will know
if you have ever watched a cat teaching her kittens to take care of
themselves and how to wash their faces and how to catch mice.
But of these mammals I need not tell you much for you know them
well. They surround you on all sides. They are 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