The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and MankindWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World history
The great apes are forest dwellers; their walking even now is
incidental; they are at their happiest among trees. They have very
distinctive methods of climbing; they swing by the arms much more than
the monkeys do, and do not, like the latter, take off with a spring from
the feet. They have a specially developed climbing style of their own.
But man walks so well and runs so swiftly as to suggest a very long
ancestry upon the ground. Also, he does not climb well now; he climbs
with caution and hesitation. His ancestors may have been running
creatures for long ages. Moreover, it is to be noted that he does not
swim naturally; he has to learn to swim, and that seems to point to a
long-standing separation from rivers and lakes and the sea. Almost
certainly that ancestor was a smaller and slighter creature than its
human descendants. Conceivably the human ancestor at the opening of the
Cainozoic period was a running ape, living chiefly on the ground, hiding
among rocks rather than trees. It could still climb trees well and hold
things between its great toe and its second toe (as the Japanese can to
this day), but it was already coming down to the ground again from a
still remoter, a Mesozoic arboreal ancestry. It is quite understandable
that such a creature would very rarely die in water in such
circumstances as to leave bones to become fossilized.
It must always be borne in mind that among its many other imperfections
the Geological Record necessarily contains abundant traces only of water
or marsh creatures or of creatures easily and frequently drowned. The
same reasons that make any traces of the ancestors of the mammals rare
and relatively unprocurable in the Mesozoic rocks, probably make the
traces of possible human ancestors rare and relatively unprocurable in
the Cainozoic rocks. Such knowledge as we have of the earliest men, for
example, is almost entirely got from a few caves, into which they went
and in which they left their traces. Until the hard Pleistocene times
they lived and died in the open, and their bodies were consumed or
decayed altogether.
But it is well to bear in mind also that the Record of the Rocks has
still to be thoroughly examined. It has been studied only for a few
generations, and by only a few men in each generation. Most men have
been too busy making war, making profits out of their neighbours,
toiling at work that machinery could do for them in a tenth of the time,
or simply playing about, to give any attention to these more interesting
things. There may be, there probably are, thousands of deposits still
untouched containing countless fragments and vestiges of man and his
progenitors. In Asia particularly, in India or the East Indies, there
may be hidden the most illuminating clues. What we know to-day of early
men is the merest scrap of what will presently be known.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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