The Fire Apes

Loren C. Eiseley

IWAS the only man in the world who sawhim do it. Everybody else was hurrying.Everybody else around that hospital was

busy, or flat on his back and beyond seeing.I had a smashed ankle and was using a crutch,so I couldn't hurry. That was the only reasonI was on the grounds and allowed to sit on abench. If it hadn't been for that I would havemissed it. I saw what it meant, too. I hadthe perspective, you see, and the time to thinkabout it. In the end I hardly knew whetherto be glad or sorry, but it was a frighteningexperience, perhaps not so much frighteningas weird because I suddenly and preternatur-ally saw very close to the end-the end of all ofus-and it happened because of that squirrel.The bird-feeding station stood on the lawn

. before my bench. Whoever had erected itwas a bird-lover, not a squirrel enthusiast,that much was certain. It was on top of asection of thin pipe stuck upright in theground, and over the end of the pipe half ofa bread can had been inverted. The thin,smooth pipe and the bread can were to keepsquirrels from the little wooden platform androof where the birds congregated to feed.The feeding platform was attached just abovethe tin shield that protected it from the squir-rels. I could see that considerable thoughthad gone into the production of this appara-tus and that it was carefully placed so thatno squirrel could spring across from a nearbytree.In the space of the morning I watched five

squirrels lope easily across the lawn and try

their wits on the puzzle. It was clear thatthey knew the bread was there-the problemwas to reach it. Five squirrels in successionclawed their way up the thin pipe only todiscover they were foiled by the tin umbrellaaround which they could not pass. Eachsquirrel in turn slid slowly and protestinglyback to earth-;-flinched at my distant chuckle..and went away with a careful appearance oftotal disinterest that preserved his dignity.There was a sixth squirrel that came after

a time, but I was bored by then, and only halfwatching. God knows how many things a.man misses by becoming smug and assumingthat matters will take their natural course.I almost drowsed enough to miss it, and if Ihad, I might have gone away from there stillbelieving in the fixity of species, or theinviolability of the human plane of existence.I might even have died believing some crassanthropocentric dogma about the uniquenessof the human brain.As it was, I had just one sleepy eye half

open, and it was through that that I saw theend of humanity. It was really a very littleepisode, and if it hadn't been for the squirrelI wouldn't have seen it at all. The thing was:he stopped to think. He stopped right thereat the bottom of the pole and looked up andI knew he was thinking. Then he went up.

HE WENT up with a bound that swayedthe thin pipe slightly and teetered theloose shield. In practically the next

second he had caught the tilted rim of the

Professor Eisele», head of the department of anthropologyat the University of Pennsylvania, is an assiduous bone-hunter who has written often for Harper's about Early Man.

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shield with an outstretched paw, flicked hisbody on to and over it, and was sitting onthe platform where only birds were supposedto be. He dined well there and daintily, andwent away in due time in the neat quickfashion by which he had arrived. I cluckedat him and he stopped a moment in hisleisurely sweep over the grass, holding upone paw and looking at me with the smallshrewd glance of the wood people. Thereare times now when I think it was a momen-tous meeting and that for just a second inthat sunlit glade, the present and the futuremeasured each other, half conscious in somestrange way of their destinies. Then he wasloping away with the autumn sunlight flicker-ing on his fur, to a tree where I could notfollow him. I turned away and limped backto the shadow of my bench."He's a smart squirrel, all right," I tried to

reassure myself. "He's a super-smart squirrel,but just the same he's only a squirrel. Be-sides, there are monkeys that can solve betterproblems than that. A nice bit of naturalhistory, an insight into a one-ounce brain atits best, but what's the significance of--"It was just then I got it. The chill that had

been slowly crawling up my back as I facedthat squirrel. You have to remember whatI said about perspective. I have been steepedin geological eras; my mind is filled with theosseous debris of a hundred graveyards. Uptill now I had dealt with the past. I was oneof the planet's undisputed masters. But thatsquirrel had busy fingers. He was lopingaway from me into the future.The chill came with the pictures, and those

pictures rose dim and vast, as though evokedfrom my subconscious memory by that smalluplifted paw. They were not pleasant pic-tures. They had to do with times far off andalien. There was one, I remember, of gasp-ing amphibian heads on the shores of marshes,with all about them the birdless silence of aland into which no vertebrate life had everpenetrated because it could not leave thewater. There was another in which greatbrainless monsters bellowed in the steaminghollows of a fern forest, while tiny wraith-likemammals eyed them from the underbrush.There was a vast lonely stretch of air, throughwhich occasionally skittered the ill-aimedflight of lizard-like birds. And finally therewas a small gibbon-like primate teetering

along through a great open parkland, uprighton his two hind feet. Once he turned, and Iseemed to see something familiar about him,but he passed into the shade.There were more pictures, but always they

seemed to depict great empty corridors, cor-ridors in the sense of a planet's spaces, firstempty and then filled with life. Always alongthose corridors as they filled, were _eagerwatchers, watching from the leaves, watchingfrom the grasses, watching from the woods'edge. Sometimes the watchers ventured outa little way and retreated. Sometimes theyemerged and strange changes overtook thecorridor.It was somewhere there at the last on the

edge of a dying city that I thought I recog-nized my squirrel. He was farther out of thewoods now, bolder, and a bit more insolent,but he was still a squirrel. The city wasdying, that was plain, but the cause was un-discernible. I saw with a slight shock thatnothing seemed very important about it. Itwas dying slowly, in the length of centuries,and all about it the little eyes under the leaveswere closing in. It was then that I understood,finally, and no longer felt particularly glador sorry. The city was forfeit to those littleshining brains at the woods' edge. I knew howlong they had waited. And we, too, had beenat the woods' edge in our time. We couldafford to go now. Our vast intellectual cor-ridor might stretch empty for a million years.It did not matter. My squirrel would attendto it. And if not he, then the wood rats. Theywere all there waiting under the leaves.

II

ISUPPOSE everyone keeps by his night lightsome collection of tales by which he mayfrighten himself back to sleep in moments

of insomnia. I know that I do. And if youare like me, you have, on occasional mid-nights, disputed lordship of the planet withintellectual octopi, or seen mankind pushedhorribly aside by giant termites. These no-tions may be sinister at midnight, but thetruths of daylight are simpler and more ter-rible: mankind may perish without assistancefrom any of these.The human brain was a beautiful and ter-

rible invention. It is unique. And becauseit is unique there are many who believe that

THE FIRE APES 49

its achievements will never be possible ofduplication in nature, that, in the words ofone naturalist, "progress hangs on but asingle thread. That thread is the humangerm plasm." A French scholar murmurs alittle uneasily "man alone in the universe isnot finished." Julian Huxley defends theuniqueness of the human species with an im-passioned vigor. "Among the actual inhabi-tants of the earth," he says, "past and present,no other lines could have been taken whichwould have produced speech and conceptualthought ... It could not have been evolvedon earth except in man."That remark is both wise, in a sense, and

foolish. It is the statement of a man who haslooked far into the depths of the past andseen nothing so wonderful as man. Yet it be-trays also the reluctance of the human imagi-nation as it turns toward the future-its con-cern with itself, its unwillingness to relin-quish the stage. This genuinely profoundmind is surely not unaware that an intellec-tual dinosaur of the dying Cretaceous mightwell have murmured: "The saurians aloneare not finished. What possible things couldimprove upon us?" The Cretaceous date linewould have made it a wise and Huxlianstatement. It would have taken ten millionyears to force its serious alteration. Mr.Huxley is equally safe from refutation, sosafe in fact that he sniffs contemptuously atthe potential threat offered by our rowdy re-maining cousins up in the family tree. "Themonkeys," he says, "have quite left behindthem that more generalized stage from whicha conscious thinking creature could develop."I am afraid that we are altogether too im-

pressed by the fact; that we live on the groundand that our remaining relatives, poor fellows,show a decided preference for trees. It neverseems to occur to us that. if they didn't stay upthere we would jolly well show them whatfor. As for that "more generalized stage"which Mr. Huxley demands for the appear-ance of a thinking creature, I am quite surethat he cannot define it in a way which wouldseriously threaten the reputation of severalexisting primates.The only way to become a "generalized

stage" is to produce, in the course of time,several divergent smart descendants. No onecan say that that faculty has been lost, but thewhole monkey group will stay upstairs now

till we are gone. And if they don't comedown, there is still my squirrel, whose actionsat times remind me of a certain ancient hu-man forerunner in the Eocene. That chapwasn't recognized as "generalized" either,until somewhere along the way he began towalk on his hind feet. In the beginning,I'm not at all sure he was as smart as mysquirrel.Now I have said that Mr. Huxley is safe

from refutation, geological time being whatit is. If it is impossible to refute him untilthe passage of another sixty million years, itmight be more comfortable to assume he hasspoken the truth. It might have been, that is,up until last year. It was then that scientistsbegan to scratch actively in the African bonelands. It was then that archeologists beganto Whisper behind their hands and exchangeglances. It concerned, of course, a certainskull. That in itself was bad enough, but whatensued was worse.

HEWAS an ape, they had said in the be-ginning: "A creature lacking the dis-tinctive temporal expansions which

appear to be concomitant with and necessaryto articulate man is no true man." Thenthere had come that frightening insistence onthe part of his discoverer that he had used fireand tools.The little fellow was promptly redescribed.

His type was cited in glowing terms as "intel-ligent, energetic, erect, and delicately pro-portioned little people." He was creditedwith speech, and spoken of respectfully as apotential human ancestor. It was more com-fortable that way. Otherwise you were con-fronted with a spectacle like Dunsany's mys-terious Abu Laheeb, that strange being squat-ting over its lonely fire in the marshes-theonly beast in the world that made fire likeman.The mythical Abu Laheeb survived by hid-

ing in the papyrus swamps of the upper Nile.Australopithecus prometheus, the ape whomade fire, was not that fortunate. He disap-peared. The reason why concerns Mr. Hux-ley's philosophy and is in some sense a refuta-tion of it. Men say, in the books, that manis the last hope of life on the planet, the lastchance, that is, for brain. In the past, how-ever, when man was yet weak, a cousin triedto take the path he walked upon and almost

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succeeded. A cousin from the despised rooftree, where the eyes still watch us overhead.To explain his failure and near success,we

must go back millions of years. To explainwhat will come after our own extinction, wemust again read backward-not for biologicalevents which can never be repeated in exacti-tude, not for signs of the reappearance offorms which have had their day and willnever' again emerge into the light-but ratherto project forward into the future those dreadprinciples which have controlled the move-ment of life on this planet through untoldeons of time, and which will continue todirect its destiny through the untold eonsof the future. The destructiveness of man haslent a sparse and impoverished aspect to theanimal life of the present day. It impliessenescence and decline. Both are illusory.The great life stream awaits only its oppor-tunity-the moment of human disappearance.

III

THERE are two sorts of evolutionarymovement in the world of life, andone is more mysterious than the other.

There are, for example, the slight differenceswhich arise between species, the multiplicityof closely related shrubs, grasses, trees, andanimals which can be observed over an acreof ground. All of these forms, plant andanimal alike, may be occupying essentiallythe same environment or small, slightly diver-gent "micro-environments" within that acre.The diversity is pleasing. It leads us to com-ment on the infinite richness of life. Muchof this burgeoning splendor is, nevertheless,without meaning so far as the grander pro-gression of life is concerned. Some of it isthe product of genetic drift which may havelittle importance even in terms of naturalselection. It is diversity without significance,save as it represents the infinite capacities ofthe cell.The real mystery, by contrast, lies on a

mightier stage. It is the great symphonicmovement through the world of the corridors.It is the fish who crawled ashore on his fins,the amphibian who painfully learned to walk.It is the reptile who invented the egg andthus released land vertebrates from depend-ence on the water. It is the saurian whoflew, and who also learned to controlhis body

temperature until he became a high-speedefficient mammalian machine whose brain didnot grow torpid in the chilling night. It in-cludes, also, a creature who came down fromthe trees and took his first tentative step downthe long grassland corridor that was to leadhim out into the magnificient vistas of con-ceptual thought.The advance into those various worlds, into

the air and the light out of the depths ofthe waters consumed millions of years ofeffort. It was not all an upward movement.Species by thousands died; species went intothe ground; species went back to the waters;species clung to the high trees and shriekeddown at their human brothers. The smallermovements we understand well-the horsefrom five toes to one, the age-by-age growthof horns on Triceratops or the titanotheres.Instead it is the plunge through the for-

bidden zones that catches the heart with itssheer audacity. In the history of life therehave been few such episodes. It is that whichmakes us lonely. We have entered a new cor-ridor, the cultural corridor. There has beennothing here before us. In it we are utterlyalone. In it we are appallingly unique. Welook at each other and say, "It can never bedone again." It is almost as though in ourvery bones were Ielt ancestral memories of theway we have come, and the feeling like magictouches us once more so that we repeat withsomething like terror in our voices, "It cannever be done again."Now it is one of the strange paradoxes of

biology that this feeling of mystery concern-ing the great biological inventions whichhave opened the doorways of life has deepenedas our knowledge has increased. Long evolu-tionary lines in a given environmental zonehave been worked out, transition forms havebeen noted, and many sequences leading byimperceptible degrees from one form to an-other have been observed. In the beginning,Darwin and his followers assumed confidentlythat the major gaps which yawned betweenthe phyla-the space, say, between the fish andthe amphibian, between the reptile and thebird-would eventually be found to containtransition forms extending in the same imper-ceptible way from the one form to the other,even though a major life threshold had beencrossed.The lack of such transitional forms was

,THE FIRE APES

not at first disturbing. Success in the pursuitof ancestral lines over long time-intervals ledto the conclusion that these major gaps weredue solely to imperfections in the geologicalrecord; that the book of Nature had, so tospeak, missing pages, but that the main out-lines of the story could easily be read fromthe pages that remained. It was not untilmuch later that those missing pages were'observed to occur with almost monotonousregularity at some dramatic transition point,involving the emergence of a new form oflife and its adaptation to either an unenteredcorridor or a corridor offering possibilities ofbeing intruded upon in some new way. Thenew type, in other words, seemed to emergewith astounding quickness, considering thegenerally slow evolutionary pace to be readfrom many of the remains which the fossilhunters were discovering in the better knownstrata of the earth.

THIS situation has led to much specula-tion. It has led on the part of someto a denial of the reality of evolution,

on the part of others to claims for some typeof "jumping evolution" in which fantasti-cally complex mutations brought new organicforms into existence at a single step. Theconfusion created by this situation is perhapsnowhere better expressed than in Lecomtede Nouy's recent book, The Road to Reason.He says: "The general fact that paleontologyonly shows us a few transitional forms andstill fewer really primitive forms, is also verydisturbing .... We do not grasp the originof any group."It happens, however, that these widely ex-

pressed doubts are often tinged unconsciouslywith emotionalism. The gaps exist but isolateddiscoveries reveal that transitional forms areby no means non-existent. They are merelyscarce. We have in growing numbers themammal-like reptiles standing between thereptiles and the mammals. We have a strange,rare creature, Archaeopteryx, lying betweenthe reptiles and the birds. There are othergaps which remain unclosed. These signs are,nevertheless, suggestive. More fossils will befound. Those which we possess, inadequatethough they are, do not SUppOTtthe notionof fantastic leaps in nature.They suggest, instead, that the march across

a major 8arrier into a new sphere of existence

51

is made rapidly if it is made successfully atall. A basic organic change of this nature isestimated by the brilliant modern student,G. G. Simpson, to have proceeded at a pace,in some instances, ten or fifteen times morerapid than the later recorded evolution ofa given group after it has begun to exploitits new domain. The comparatively hastycrossing, hasty in a geological sense, was madeby small groups of animals undergoing ex-treme selection pressure. As a consequence,there will never be numerous fossils. Archae-opteryx, the bird-reptile, for example, wasfound in 1861. It still remains a solitary spec-imen.Another fact can be noted as we study these

records. It is in a sense obvious, yet it hasbeen neglected by many writers obsessed withhuman uniqueness or with the superiority ofthe mammalian line in general. It can be laiddown almost as a truism. No successful cross-ing into a new corridor of life can be effectedif that corridor is completely dominated byprior intruders.This statement must be made somewhat

dogmatically. Apparent exceptions can be ob-served, but they constitute special cases whichdo not affect the general principle. It couldbe noted, for example, that the reptiles madetwo separate attempts to conquer the air cor-ridor, once by the use of membraneous wings-the giant glider Pteranodon being a popu-larly known example-and secondly by theevolution of true wings and feathers. Both at-tempts were successful for a long period, andboth must have competed for a time. Even-tually the Pterosaurs disappeared and left thecorridor to the birds.Two facts explain this rather unusual situa-

tion. Both forms apparently got across intothe airways at approximately the same time,so that neither one had radiated and adaptedsufficiently to exclude the other. In addition,the development of flowering plants with ac-companying nutritious seeds in the Creta-ceous period profoundly stimulated insect evo-lution. The nutritive possibilities in the aircorridor thus increased, but increased in adirection which favored the smaller, speedier,and more effective mechanism, namely, thebirds.From the Cretaceous to the present the

birds have dominated the airways, and thesmaller environmental niches within the air-

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ways so effectively that no other vertebratehas successfully challenged their control. Oneother animal, it is true, has evolved true flightin the interim, but its position only revealsthe reality of our truism. The bats, true mam-mals, came late to the scene. They made thecrossing, but made it surreptitiously in theevening twilight. The vast majority of birdsare diurnal. The bats cling to the edge ofevening, and such prey as they can find there.Their numbers, in comparison with birds, arescant. Both figuratively and literally, they arecreatures of the twilight, dwellers at the un-wanted margin. That is why they survive.What the bats might have been capable of

under other circumstances, it is, of course,impossible to conjecture, but the tremendousenergies, the unknown capacities which maybe held in check while a new form of lifesurges endlessly against an already closed cor-ridor, is nowhere better illustrated than inthe story of the rise of the mammalian worlditself. Our interpretation of that rise is aptto be distinctly colored. We think of dino-saurs as great brainless beasts which failed inthe struggle for life, and we think of themammals, our own ancestral line, as a highlyeffective group which crowded the reptilesaside. Nothing, in actuality, could be furtherfrom the truth.

IREMARKED on an earlier page that thetruths of daylight are often the mostterrible, and that the end of the human

story does not demand our extermination atthe hands of some more intellectual or fan-tastic form of life. That statement was de-liberate. The reptiles are a prime example.For 140 million years, during that periodknown as the Mesozoic, they were the undis-puted masters of this planet. In enormousnumbers they radiated into every possiblegeographic niche. They swam and they flewand they walked. Brainless or not, they sur-vived a period of time far more extended thanthe life of man, far more extended than the'whole Age of Mammals.Now what is not very generally understood

by the lay public is the fact that throughoutthe greater portion of this 140 million yearsthe mammalian world was in existence. It wasin existence, but it was highly inconspicuous.It was small; it hid under bushes; it concealeditself in trees. It had no giant representatives

such as it developed later on after the dis-appearance of the reptiles .. Like the bats onthe edge of the bird world, it was existing ontolerance. It was marginal. To have grownlarger would have been to invite the attentionof the most formidable carnivores the worldhas even seen-perfected killing machines withteeth like bear traps.For a hundred million years those little

mammals waited. No one would havedreamed that they, in their turn, might createmonsters, and no one, above all, would haveimagined that the gray and infinitely complexconvolutions of the human brain were lockedaway in the forebrain of an insectivorous crea-ture no larger than a rat. An observer wait-ing for some sign of creative emergenceamong those little animals in the underbrushwould have grown weary as years by the mil-lion flowed away. He would have swornthat every variation in the game of life hadbeen exploited and played out-that thereptiles were the master form-that the mam-mals were effective only upon an infinitelysmall size level.Yet in the end, that strange end that closed

the day of the Ruling Reptiles, the armoredgiants vanished. They vanished from the seasand the fern forests; their great gliding wingsdisappeared from the coastal air. Nothingliving, so far as we can determine today,threatened them. The mammals were insig-nificant, envious eyes in the reeds-that wasall. We in this remote age may murmurabout climatic change or anyone of a dozenvague possibilities. Sometimes we considerthe notion that species may run through aIifetirne, grow old and die, as does an indi-vidual organism. We do not know. But thiswe are unpleasantly aware of: the armoredones went in daylight. Nothing, not eventheir successors, thrust them aside. It wouldbe millions of years before the shovel headsof the mammalian titanotheres grazed in thevalleys that knew the thunder lizard, Tricera-tops.The mammals did not destroy the great rep-

tiles; they simply occupied, long after, anempty throne. It was only then that the longsuppression of creative energy burst forth ina second marvelous efflorescence, the radia-tion that created the mammalian world. Thestory, however, has a moral that is little read:man also is the master of a corridor; there is

THE FIRE APES 53

nothing visible to compete with him. He hasdestroyed the great mammals and left onlythe little eyes under the rosebush in thegarden. He is safe now to write books abouthis unique qualities-and he is unique, asunique as the dinosaurs. He will not bemenaced from the field's edge, but the eyesare still waiting. Once they waited a hundredmillion years. They can do so again.This time it will be a new corridor-the

cultural corridor-that they enter, but it willnot be as unique as it seems to us, writing aswe do that we are the "sole representative oflife in its progressive aspect and its sole trusteefor any progress in the future."Once, long ago in Africa, that cousin of

whom I spoke made tools and, some think,may have experimented with the forbiddenmagic of fire itself. Small and timid and slightof brain, he fades back into the silences ofpre-history. He made the crossing at thewrong moment, but he proved we are not sounique aswe imagine, that the crossing can bemade again, perhaps even from above, outof the old roof tree, where everyone sits withhis tail curled safely out of reach.It is the safety of trees or the safety of being

men now. The line is sharp; there is no half-way mark as there was when the first ill-ad-justed migrants stumbled into an empty world.There is no longer any room for an ape wholights fires and is not a man.

IV

XMOST everything about this animal, upuntil recently, has been controversialexcept the fact that it existed. It has

been called an ape. It has been called a man.It has been said to have walked upright. It hasbeen said that this is untrue. It has beenclaimed that it spoke. It is said not to havespoken.. More complete specimens have lately begunto fall into the hands of the bone hunters; sothat some of the questions which tormentedearlier workers have been answered. Others,however, have taken their place.The Australopithecine men-apes of South

Africa are a group of small, upright-walkinganthropoids who haunted the grasslands ofthe Vaal River area from five hundred thou-sand to a million years ago. They are not allalike in detail, but the whole stock is char-

acterized by teeth of a quite human character.The great shearing canines of the existingapes are reduced to human proportions. Theseanimals must have been omnivorous grass-land wanderers, pursuing small animals, eat-ing wild seeds, and probably robbing an oc-casional bird's nest. Around four feet inheight, with a brain ranging at 450 to 650cubic centimeters, their intellectual capacities,though low by human standards, were un-doubtedly superior to that of any existinggorilla or chimpanzee.They are the only grassland bipedal ape,

as contrasted with primitive grassland man, ofwhich we have any knowledge. As I pointedout earlier, they have been called apes. Morelately there has been a tendency to call themmen. Awkwardly enough, however, such dat-ings as we have been able to compute forthem are much too late in time to allow fortheir being the direct ancestors of true men.Some, at least, of the man-apes were the con-temporaries, for a brief while, of primitivemen.I suppose that, if the truth were known,

one reason why man is so impressed with hisown uniqueness is the fact he is alone t,9dflYin the grassland corridor. In a few remoteparts of Africa, a scant number of lower mon-keys venture into waste spaces on thegrp\Wd.The baboon is one.of them. His experimenthas turned in another direction. His face isdoglike. He runs upon all fours.Of that seriesof arboreal experimenters who

ventured into the first grasslands of the planetduring the Miocene epoch and who teetereddiffidently from one tree clump to another,upright on their two hind feet, man aloneremains. The grasslands were too open, com-petition too fierce as the sub-men multiplied,for the long continued survival of unlikeforms. We of today see a yawning gulf be-tween ourselves and the old forms in thetrees. On the grass the others have vanished.The corridor is filled and the rifle wouldeliminate any wavering half-soul from theforest twilight who was so rash as to ventureamong us. It is too late for the crossing, toolate until man has gone.

ISUPPOSE it is the illusion of uniquenesswhich for so long caused the student ofhuman evolution to take a scattered series

of human fossils and try to arrange them in

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a single line of ascent leading to modern man.It is still being tried with the new man-apes,but there are two embarrassments: their rela-tive recency, and the diversity of their species.It is simply not possible that they are all onthe main line of ascent to ourselves. That theAustralopithecines have vanished while manysimple arboreal relatives of ours survive isnot surprising. The man-apes tried to occupythe same environmental niche as man, and asa consequence man destroyed them.This does not mean that the Australopithe-

cines are totally unrelated to ourselves. Itdoes mean, however, that the old notion in-volving one human ancestral form and oneonly as taking the momentous step of climb-ing out of the trees and learning to walk up-right-thus starting a simple and direct evolu-tionary movement which culminated in manof today-is a fantastic simplification of events.Twenty million years ago the grass lands

of the world were spreading. The long cool-ing that was to produce the Ice Age of latertimes had just begun. The low continents ofthe age of reptiles were giving way to moun-tain growths that swung the ancient junglesof the earlier lands far skyward, and broughtdrought to the inner continental basins. Thegrasslands spread farther and farther. Overvast areas the jungle disappeared or shrankto parkland.We know that among the mammals of this

period, many diverse orders turned to a graz-ing existence. Changes in their teeth tell usas much, for the high silica content of grassforces the development of a specialized graz-ing dentition which will resist wear. Man, ofcourse, is not a grazer, nor were his fore-runners up in the diminishing branches.That grassland world was, nevertheless, at-

tractive. More and more animals were mov-ing into it; here and there in the park lands,anthropoid apes of forms little known ven-tured on to the ground. A little like thearchaic living gibbon, they may have scurriedon their hind feet between isolated clumps oftrees, snatching insects and seedsbefore swing-ing safely into the branches again. The slowchanges that some of these animals wereundergoing in habits and foot structure mayhave taken millions of years.There must have been many of these apes

on the edge of the grasslands. We need notbe surprised if more than one type, over the

vast Old World land mass, successfullymadethat crossing. The corridor was open to ag-gressive, lively anthropoids who were willingto hunt small animals and insects, and whosediet was unspecialized. The climate wasmorehealthful than that of the parasite-infestedjungles. A strange competition began.It was the competition of an odd lot of

animals, the apes of the grassland, uncertainlyerect, but with the neurological preferencefor that posture already developed among thebranches of the forest. It was the competitionof social animals, and therefore it was the com-petition of groups. Out of that struggle forfood, for mates, and for life, the best adapted,the most clever brained, the most success-fully communicative would survive.I say communicative because somewhere

here on the grasslands in an environment in-finitely more demanding and dangerous thanthe safe retreat of the trees, the already ex-tensive but instinctive call range of the oldtree world began to be abandoned for con-ceptual thought and speech. Under mysteri-ous endocrine influences about which weknow nothing, man' s infancy was becomingprolonged, his brain a plastic thing uponwhich incipient societywas beginning to markthe folkways of the group. The strangestcorridor in the history of life on this planet':was being entered-the cultural corridor. Itsfinal possessorswould be masters of the earth.They would write books. They would de-scribe themselves as unique. They were not.

v

THE first of those peculiar human-footedapes to which we have previously re-ferred, was announced to an incredu-

lous world by Professor Raymond Dart in1924. It took over twenty years to discovermore of them and to learn something of theirhabits. Because it was not believed, at first,that they spoke or made tools, Dart, in spiteof his conviction that they were closely asso-ciated with the earlier history of the humanline, referred to them as "no true men."This year, at Makapansgat in the Central

Transvaal of South Africa, Dart reported A us-tralopithecus prometheus, the fire-maker. Re-porters, of course, went wild. Scientistsscratched their heads and looked dubiouslyat one another. The new fossil was reported

TWO FAMOUS MEN COMMENT ON RUSSIA, II. 55

from deposits showing evidence of the useof fire in the shape of charred bone and tracesof charcoal. Though no stone weapons werediscovered, there were suspicious indications'that Prometheus had used the long bones ofslain animals as clubs. A series of neatly frac-tured baboon skulls from which the brain hadprobably been extracted for food suppliedthe evidence.A very simple tool-using capacity on the

part of an animal with a 650 cubic centimeterbrain capacity is acceptable. That these crea-tures were fire-users has shaken all our estab-lished notions of human culture history. Thesuspicion continues to be entertained in somequarters, and will continue until further re-ports are available, that perhaps advancedforms of men may be responsible for the firesand the broken cranial case of Prometheushimself. It is known, at least, that there aresomewhat later humanly occupied caves atMakapan. It must not be forgotten, however,that it was Dr. Dart who recognized, overtwenty years ago, the importance of the first\Australopithecine cranium; it was conserva-tive science that smiled and later had to eatits words.Whether or not the human-footed apes were

fire-users, we know that the animal remains-with which they are associated at Makapanplace them well within Early Ice Age times.Human relatives they are, but in the narrowsense, at least, they are not men.' Men, low-browed, perhaps, but true men, were alreadyin existence. The man-apes, by contrast, area part of that ancient bipedal horde which

millions of years ago came out upon the grass-lands. Less massive than their divergent hu-man brothers, they clung to the fringe of thecorridor, ran before its terrors, and sharedwith us that dark and ancient blood from thetimes before man.Perhaps at the last, late, much too late, they

lit the fires that might have made them man;perhaps even-and that in itself is a weirdthought, since no animal alive has done it-they watched trembling behind a bush andlearned from men the secret of the fire. Per-haps already in some dim, half-human waythey sensed their world was fading. Theirswere the last furred hands and theirs thelast half-animal voices to be seen and heardin the cultural corridor before the pathwaybackward closed forever. When it opens againwe shall be gone.Sometimes at night I think one can feel

even the pressure of mice waiting in the wallsof old houses. All that concentrated lifearound us and above us, held in check, surg-ing impatiently, ready for a new experiment,tired of us, waiting our passing, active withthe busy mysteries of the cell. Sometimes onecatches oneself wondering what the fire-apeswere intending when they crossed the barxier,whether they were cut short in a new experi-ment, something smaller, more delicateurnore-something, but not a human sometbing.Something for which human beings must firstbe gotten out of the way. It is perhaps sig-nificant that even we ourselves feel a growinginadequacy. Perhaps that is really the secret.Perhaps we are going away.

Two Famous Men Comment on Russia, ILThe sources of the two statements on page 37 are respectively;

(1) A telegram received by the editor of the New York American)on February 26, 1918, from William Randolph Hearst.

(2) An article in the New York Tribune) on April 12, 1853, fromits European correspondent, Karl Marx.