food and shelter. It had learned to use its fore-feet for the purpose of holding

its prey, and by dint of practice it had developed a hand-like claw. After

innumerable attempts it had learned how to balance the whole of the body upon

the hind legs. (This is a difficult act, which every child has to learn anew

although the human race has been doing it for over a million years.)

 

This creature, half ape and half monkey but superior to both, became the most

successful hunter and could make a living in every clime. For greater safety, it

usually moved about in groups. It learned how to make strange grunts to warn its

young of approaching danger and after many hundreds of thousands of years it

began to use these throaty noises for the purpose of talking.

 

This creature, though you may hardly believe it, was your first "man-like"

ancestor.

 

OUR EARLIEST ANCESTORS

 

WE know very little about the first "true" men. 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 man

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.