io6 THE ORIGIN OF MAN 



common ancestral tribe of some thousands of years 

 ago. They are remote cousins of ours. So the living 

 apes and monkeys are related to us only through a 

 common ancestral tribe of three or four million years 

 ago. They are remote cousins. Thoughtless people 

 sometimes ask why we cannot turn a man-like ape 

 into a man. They never ask whether we could turn 

 a negro or a Red Indian into a white European. Yet 

 the white and black and red men had a common 

 ancestor probably less than quarter of a million 

 years ago, whereas it is certainly much more than a 

 million years, possibly two or three million years, 

 since the common ancestor of the ape and the man 

 lived. 



The difficulty that some people still have in 

 imagining the descent — it would be better to say 

 "ascent" — of man from an ape-like form of long ago 

 is caused by the foolish habit of contrasting themselves 

 with a gorilla or an orang. There is about themselves 

 a dignity, a wisdom, a virtue that are lamentably 

 absent from the gorilla. But if, instead of taking 

 that finished product of human evolution, ourselves, 

 we adopt the more sensible course of taking a lower 

 type of human being, the argument grows thinner. 

 After all, it is not we who descended from an ape-like 

 form; it is our remote ancestors. We descended from 

 them. So let us get as near as we can to our ancestors. 

 The Australian black takes us a long way. I have 

 seen Australian aboriginal "ladies" who would not 



