The Ascent of Man Read Online Free PDF

foods. But the light Australopithecus broke the ancient primate habit of vegetarianism.
    The change from a vegetarian to an omnivorous diet, once made, persisted in Homo erectus , Neanderthal man and Homo sapiens . From the ancestral light Australopithecus onwards, the family of man ate some meat: small animals at first, larger oneslater. Meat is a more concentrated protein than plant, and eating meat cuts down the bulk and the time spent in eating by two-thirds. The consequences for the evolution of man were far-reaching. He had more time free, and could spend it in more indirect ways, to get food from sources (such as large animals) which could not be tackled by hungry brute force. Evidently that helped to promote (by naturalselection) the tendency of all primates to interpose an internal delay in the brain between stimulus and response, until it developed into the full human ability to postpone the gratification of desire.
    But the most marked effect of an indirect strategy to enhance the food supply is, of course, to foster social action and communication. A slow creature like man can stalk, pursue and corner alarge savannah animal that is adapted for flight only by co-operation. Hunting requires conscious planning and organisation by means of language, as well as special weapons. Indeed, language as we use it has something of the character of a hunting plan, in that (unlike the animals) we instruct one another in sentences which are put together from movable units. The hunt is a communal undertaking ofwhich the climax, but only the climax, is the kill.
    Hunting cannot support a growing population in one place; the limit for the savannah was not more than two people to the square mile. At that density, the total land surface of the earth could only support the present population of California, about twenty million, and could not support the population of Great Britain. The choice for the hunterswas brutal: starve or move.
    They moved away over prodigious distances. By a million years ago, they were in North Africa. By seven hundred thousand years ago, or even earlier, they were in Java. By four hundred thousand years ago, they had fanned out and marched north, to China in the east and Europe in the west. These incredible spreading migrations made man, from an early time, a widely dispersedspecies, even though his total numbers were quite small – perhaps one million.
    What is even more forbidding is that man moved north just after the climate there was turning to ice. In the great cold the ice, as it were, grew out of the ground. The northern climate had been temperate for immemorial ages – literally for several hundred million years. Yet before Homo erectus settled in China andnorthern Europe, a sequence of three separate Ice Ages began.
    The first was past its fiercest when Peking man lived in caves, four hundred thousand years ago. It is no surprise to find fire used in those caves for the first time. The ice moved south and retreated three times, and the land changed each time. The icecaps at their largest contained so much of the earth’s water that the level ofthe sea fell four hundred feet. After the second Ice Age, over two hundred thousand years ago, Neanderthal man with his big brain appears, and he became important in the last Ice Age.
    The cultures of man that we recognise best began to form in the most recent Ice Age, within the last hundred or even fifty thousand years. That is when we find the elaborate tools that point to sophisticated formsof hunting: the spear-thrower, for example, and the baton that may be a straightening tool; the fully barbed harpoon; and, of course, the flint master tools that were needed to make the hunting tools.
    It is clear that then, as now, inventions may be rare but they spread fast through a culture. For example, the Magdalenian hunters of southern Europe fifteen thousand years ago invented the harpoon.In the early period of the invention, the Magdalenian harpoons were