face than I have upon the features of that skull. I come there often, drawn in 

 spite of myself. It is a face that would lend reality to the fantastic tales of our 

 childhood. There is a hint of Wells's Time Machine folk in it— those pathetic, 

 childlike people whom Wells pictures as haunting earth's autumnal cities in the 

 far future of the dying planet. 



Yet this skull has not been spirited back to us through future eras by a Time 

 Machine. It is a thing, instead, of the millennial past. It is a caricature of modern 

 man, not by reason of its primitiveness but, startlingly, because of a modernity 

 outreaching his own. It constitutes, in fact, a mysterious prophecy and warning. 

 For at the very moment in which students of humanity have been sketching their 

 concept of the man of the future, that being has already come, and lived, and 

 passed away. [Eiseley 1958, 127-28] 



When Eiseley shows his students in Philadelphia a picture of what the 

 man of the future may be expected to look like, they say, "It's O.K. Some- 

 body's keeping an eye on things. Our heads are getting bigger and our teeth 

 are getting smaller. Look!" Eiseley continues: 



Their voices ring with youthful confidence, the confidence engendered by my 

 persuasive colleagues and myself. At times I glow a little with their reflected 

 enthusiasm. 



I should like to regain that confidence, that warmth. I should like to but. . . . 



There's just one thing we haven't quite dared to mention. It's this, and you 

 won't believe it. It's all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand 

 years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. 



Where did it get him? Nowhere. Maybe there isn't any future. Or, if there is, 

 maybe it's only what you find in a little heap of bones on a certain South African 

 beach. 



Many of you who read this belong to the White race. We like to think about 

 this man of the future as being White. It flatters our ego. But the man of the 

 future in the past I'm talking about was not White. He lived in Africa. His brain 

 was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child's face. 

 He was the end evolutionary product in a direction quite similar to the one an- 

 thropologists tell us is the road down which we are travelling. [Ibid., pp. 129-30] 



When one takes a long-term evolutionary look at this problem, it seems 

 that a larger brain size may once have been vitally important in aiding sur- 

 vival—for instance, in a world teeming- with wild animals and devoid of 

 harnessed fire. The further development of man would seem to have placed 

 less and less of a premium on the size of his brain. For culture and the 

 benevolence of social life have taken the place of nimble wits as an insur- 

 ance policy against extinction. Beyond a certain stage in the increase of 

 brain size, we have no evidence that further increase in any way improved 

 man's adaptive abilities. 



10, j£ 



