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.
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