90 evolution: the ages and tomorrow 



back as nearly 1,000,000 years in the time of Dart's fire- 

 making South African ape-man. 



Gradually, using fire for warmth and to make more palat- 

 able the animal flesh with which he was augmenting his 

 ancestral fruit and vegetable diet, early man conquered the 

 cold. Anthropologists once thought it rather strange that 

 early pre-humans added flesh to their diet, but we now 

 know that the modern chimpanzee does just that to a limited 

 extent (using insects and perhaps an occasional bird). The 

 South African ape-men seem definitely to have mixed ba- 

 boon meat in with their vegetables. Free hands guided by a 

 brain sharpened by the chill and dangers of his day gave to 

 early man the beginnings of his cultural inventiveness. 

 Physical anthropologists definitely see in man a former hot 

 climate, nearly hairless, fruit-eating ape. Man's linearity of 

 physique is that of an ape which had not known cold, since 

 adaptation to frigid climate usually involves the drawing of 

 the body into a more spherical compactness and the addition 

 of fur and fat to prevent heat loss. To survive man had to 

 use fire and appropriate the fur of more naturally adapted 

 animals, although he himself underwent some selective 

 change as is shown in the short, rotund Eskimo and the 

 "bean pole," extravagantly tall Negro of the hot Sudan. 



Man, it would appear, owes his present success to the pe- 

 culiarity of climate. Had the Pleistocene ice ages not gradu- 

 ally chilled his early world he would probably, in spite of 

 his readiness for the trial, still be little above the level of his 

 ape cousins. Again, the student of evolution is impressed 

 with the great importance and uniqueness of the environ- 

 mental configurations. An endless series of adaptive and cli- 

 matic changes with the setting-up of trends through hun- 

 dreds of millions of years is involved in the "accident of 

 man." Nature, it most certainly seems, arrived finally at hu- 

 manistic ends, but she arrived there blindly. 



Early in the history of the primates from the primitive 

 lemur upward, one of those fortunate evolutionary trends 



