Instructor Note: This book presents an Old Earth viewpoint that assumes evolution in the first three chapters. Instructors who wish to avoid or delay this instruction may wish to start with Chapter 4.

We know very little about the first "true" humans. We have never seen their pictures. In the deepest layer of clay of an ancient soil we have sometimes found pieces of their bones. These lay buried amidst the broken skeletons of other animals that have long since disappeared from the face of the earth. Anthropologists (learned scientists who devote their lives to the study of humans as a member of the animal kingdom) have taken these bones and they have been able to reconstruct our earliest ancestors with a fair degree of accuracy.

The ancestors of the human race were very ugly and unattractive mammals. They were quite small, much smaller than the people of today. The heat of the sun and the biting wind of the cold winter had colored their skin a dark brown. Their head and most of their body, their arms and legs too, were covered with long, coarse hair. They had very thin but strong fingers which made their hands look like those of a monkey. Their forehead was low and their jaw was like the jaw of a wild animal which uses its teeth both as fork and knife. They wore no clothes. They had seen no fire except the flames of the rumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with their smoke and their lava.

They lived in the damp blackness of vast forests. When they felt the pangs of hunger they ate raw leaves and the roots of plants or they took the eggs away from an angry bird and fed them to their own young. Once in a while, after a long and patient chase, they would catch a sparrow or a small wild dog or perhaps a rabbit. These they would eat raw for they had never discovered that food tasted better when it was cooked.

During the hours of day, this primitive human being prowled about looking for things to eat.

When night descended upon the earth, they hid their children in a hollow tree or behind some heavy boulders, for they were surrounded on all sides by ferocious animals and when it was dark these animals began to prowl about, looking for something to eat for their mates and their own young, and they liked the taste of human beings. It was a world where you must either eat or be eaten, and life was very unhappy because it was full of fear and misery.

In summer, humans were exposed to the scorching rays of the sun, and during the winter their children would freeze to death in their arms. When such a creature hurt itself, (and hunting animals are forever breaking their bones or spraining their ankles) they had no one to take care of him and they must die a horrible death.

Like many of the animals who fill the Zoo with their strange noises, early humans liked to jabber. That is to say, they endlessly repeated the same unintelligible gibberish because it pleased them to hear the sound of their voice. In due time they learned that they could use this guttural noise to warn their fellow beings whenever danger threatened and they gave certain little shrieks which came to mean "there is a tiger!" or "here come five elephants." Then the others grunted something back at him and their growl meant, "I see them," or "let us run away and hide." And this was probably the origin of all language.

But, as I have said before, of these beginnings we know so very little. Early humans had no tools and built themselves no houses. They lived and died and left no trace of their existence except a few collar-bones and a few pieces of their skulls. These tell us that many thousands of years ago the world was inhabited by certain mammals who were quite different from all the other animals—who had probably developed from another unknown ape-like animal which had learned to walk on its hind-legs and use its fore-paws as hands—and who were most probably connected with the creatures who happen to be our own immediate ancestors.

It is little enough we know and the rest is darkness.