The Ascent of Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

general sense were educated. That is a great step towards cultural evolution.
    At what point can we say that the precursors of man become man himself? That is a delicate question, because such changes do not take place overnight. It would be foolish to try and make them seem more sudden than they really were – to fix the transition too sharply orto argue about names. Two million years ago we were not yet men. One million years ago we were, because by one million years ago a creature appears who can be called Homo – Homo erectus . He spreads far beyond Africa. The classical find of Homo erectus was in fact made in China. He is Peking man, about four hundred thousand years old, and he is the first creature that certainly used fire.
    Thechanges in Homo erectus that have led to us are substantial over a million years, but they seem gradual by comparison with those that went before. The successor that we know best was first found in Germany in the last century: another classic fossil skull, he is Neanderthal man. He already has a three-pound brain, as large as modern man. Probably some lines of Neanderthal man died out; but itseems likely that a line in the Middle East went on directly to us, Homo sapiens .
    Somewhere in that last million years or so, man made a change in the quality of his tools – which presumably points to some biological refinement in the hand during this period, and especially in the brain centres that control the hand. The more sophisticatedcreature (biologically and culturally) of the last halfmillion years or so could do better than copy the ancient stone choppers that went back to Australopithecus . He made tools which require much finer manipulation in the making and, of course, in the use.
    The development of such refined skills as this and the use of fire is not an isolated phenomenon. On the contrary, we must always remember that the real content of evolution (biological as wellas cultural) is the elaboration of new behaviour. It is only because behaviour leaves no fossils that we are forced to search for it in bones and teeth. Bones and teeth are not interesting in themselves, even to the creature to whom they belong; they serve him as equipment for action – and they are interesting to us because, as equipment, they reveal his actions, and changes in equipment revealchanges in behaviour and skill.
    For this reason, changes in man during his evolution did not take place piecemeal. He was not put together from the cranium of one primate and the jaw of another – that misconception is too naive to be real, and only makes a fake like the Piltdown skull. Any animal, and man especially, is a highly integrated structure, all the parts of which must change togetheras his behaviour changes. The evolution of the brain, of the hand, of the eyes, of the feet, the teeth, the whole human frame, made a mosaic of special gifts – and in a sense these chapters are each an essay on some special gift of man. They have made him what he is, faster in evolution, and richer and more flexible in behaviour, than any other animal. Unlike the creatures (some insects, for instance)that have been unchanged for five, ten, even fifty million years, he has changed over this time-scale out of all recognition. Man is not the most majestic of the creatures. Long before the mammals even, the dinosaurs were far more splendid. But he has what no other animal possesses, a jigsaw of faculties which alone, over three thousand million years of life, make him creative. Every animalleaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.
    Change in diet is important in a changing species over a time as long as fifty million years. The earliest creatures in the sequence leading to man were nimble-eyed and delicate-fingered insect and fruit eaters like the lemurs. Early apes and hominids, from Aegyptopithecus and Proconsul to the heavy Australopithecus , arethought to have spent their days rummaging mainly for vegetarian