.

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