The Story Of Mankind - Part 1

The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon The Story of Mankind High up in the north in the land called Svithjod there stands a rock.

It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide.

Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak.

When the rock has thus been worn away then a single day of eternity will have gone by.

The Setting of the Stage We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark.

Who are we?

Where do we come from?

Whither are we bound?

Slowly,

But with persistent courage,

We have been pushing this question mark further and further towards that distant line,

Beyond the horizon where we hope to find our answer.

We have not gone very far.

We still know very little,

But we have reached the point where,

With a fair degree of accuracy,

We can guess at many things.

In this chapter I shall tell you how,

According to our best belief,

The stage was set for the first appearance of man.

If we represent a time during which it has been possible for animal life to exist upon our planet by a line of this length,

Then the tiny line just below indicates the age during which man,

Or a creature more or less resembling man,

Has lived upon this earth.

Man was the last to come but the first to use his brain for the purpose of conquering the forces of nature.

That is the reason why we are going to study him,

Rather than cats or dogs or horses or any of the other animals,

Who,

All in their own way,

Have a very interesting historical development behind them.

In the beginning,

The planet upon which we live was,

As far as we know,

A large ball of flaming matter,

A tiny cloud of smoke in the endless ocean of space.

Gradually in the course of millions of years,

The surface burned itself out,

And was covered with a thin layer of rocks.

Upon these lifeless rocks,

The rain descended in endless torrents,

Wearing out the hard granite and carrying the dust to the valleys that lay hidden between the high cliff of the steaming earth.

Finally the hour came when the sun broke through the clouds and saw how this little planet was covered with a few small puddles which were to develop into the mighty oceans of the eastern and western hemispheres.

Then one day the great wonder happened.

What had been dead gave birth to life.

The first living cell floated upon the waters of the sea.

For millions of years it drifted aimlessly with the currents.

During all that time it was developing certain habits that it might survive more easily upon the inhospitable earth.

Some of these cells were happiest in the dark depths of the lake and the pools.

They took root in the slimy sediments which had been carried down from the tops of the hills and they became plants.

Others preferred to move about and they grew strange jointed legs,

Like scorpions,

And began to crawl along the bottom of the sea amidst the plants and the pale green things that looked like jellyfishes.

Still others,

Covered with scales,

Depended upon a swimming motion to go from place to place in their search for food,

And gradually they populated the ocean with myriads of fishes.

Meanwhile the plants had increased in number and they had to search for new dwelling places.

There was no more room for them at the bottom of the sea.

Reluctantly they left the water and made a new home in the marshes and on the mud banks that lay at the foot of the mountains.

Twice a day the tides of the ocean covered them with their brine.

For the rest of the time the plants made the best of their uncomfortable situation and tried to survive in the thin air which surrounded the surface of the planet.

After centuries of training they learned how to live as comfortably in the air as they had done in the water.

They increased in size and became shrubs and trees and at last they learned how to grow lovely flowers which attracted the attention of the busy big bumblebees and the birds who carried the seeds far and wide until the whole earth had become covered with green pastures or lay dark under the shadow of the big trees.

But some of the fishes too had begun to leave the sea and they had learned how to breathe with lungs as well as with gills.

We call such creatures amphibious which means that they are able to live with equal ease on the land and in the water.

The first frog who crosses your path can tell you all about the pleasures of the double existence of the amphibian.

Once outside of the water these animals gradually adapted themselves more and more to life on land.

Some became reptiles,

Creatures who crawl like lizards and they share the silence of the forest with the insects.

That they might move faster through the soft soil they improved upon their legs and their size increased until the world was populated with gigantic forms which the handbooks of biology list under the names of ichthyosaurus and megalosaurus and brontosaurus who grew to be 30 or 40 feet long and who could have played with elephants as a full grown cat plays with her kittens.

Some of the members of this reptilian family began to live in the tops of the trees which were then often more than a hundred feet high.

They no longer needed their legs for the purpose of walking but it was necessary for them to move quickly from branch to branch.

And so they changed a part of their skin into a sort of a parachute which stretched between the strides of their bodies and the small toes of their four feet and gradually they covered the skinny parachute with feathers and made their tails into a steering gear and flew from tree to tree and developed into true birds.

Then a strange thing happened.

All the gigantic reptiles died within a short time.

We do not know the reason.

Perhaps it was due to a sudden changing climate.

Perhaps they had grown so large that they could neither swim nor walk nor crawl so they starved to death within the sight but not within the reach of the big ferns and trees.

Whatever the cause,

The million year world empire of the big reptiles was over.

The world now began to be occupied by very different creatures.

They were the descendants of the reptiles.

But they were quite unlike these because they fed their young from the mamay,

Or the breasts of the mother.

Wherefore modern science calls these animals mammals.

They had shed the scales of the fish.

They did not adopt the feathers of the bird.

But they covered their bodies with hair.

The mammals however developed other habits which gave their race a great advantage over the other animals.

The female of the species carried the eggs of the young inside her body until they were hatched and while all other living beings up to that time had left their children exposed to the dangers of cold and heat and the attacks of wild beasts,

The mammals kept their young with them for a long time and sheltered them while they were still too weak to fight their enemies.

In this way,

The young mammals were given a much better chance to survive because they learned many things from their mothers.

As you will know if you have ever watched a cat teaching her kittens to take care of themselves and how to wash their faces and how to catch mice.

But of these mammals I need not to tell you much for you know them very well.

They surround you on all sides.

They are your daily companions in the streets and in your home.

And you can see your less familiar cousins behind the bars of the zoological garden.

But now we come to the parting of the ways when man suddenly leaves the endless procession of dumbly living and dying creatures and begins to use his reason to shape the destiny of his race.

One mammal in particular seemed to surpass all others in its ability to find food and shelter.

It had learned to use its four 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 climate.

For greater safety it usually moved about in groups.

It learned how to make strange grunts to warn its youngs 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.

Or 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.

The great-great-grandfather of the human race was a very ugly and unattractive mammal.

He was quite small,

Much smaller than the people of today.

The heat of the sun and the biting wind of a cold winter had colored his skin a dark brown.

His head and most of his body,

His arms and legs too,

Were covered with long,

Coarse hair.

He had very thin but strong fingers,

Which made his hands look like those of a monkey.

His forehead was low,

And his jaw was like the jaw of a wild animal which uses its teeth both as a fork and knife.

He wore no clothes.

He had seen no fire except the flames of the rumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with their smoke and their lava.

He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests.

As the pygmies of Africa do this,

This very day.

When he felt the pangs of hunger,

He ate raw leaves and the roots of plants,

Or he took the eggs away from an angry bird and fed them to his own young.

Once in a while,

After a long and patient chase,

He would catch a sparrow or small wild dog,

Or perhaps a rabbit.

These he would eat raw,

For he 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,

He hid his wife and his children in a hollow tree or behind some heavy boulders,

For he was 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,

Man was exposed to the scorching rays of the sun,

And during the winter,

His children would freeze to death in his arms.

When such a creature hurt itself,

And hunting animals are forever breaking their bones or spraining their ankles,

He had no one to take care of him,

And he must die a horrible death.

Like many of the animals who filled the zoo with their strange noises,

Early man lucked to jabber.

That is to say,

He endlessly repeated the same unintelligible gibberish,

Because it pleased him to hear the sound of his own voice.

In due time,

He learned that he could use this guttural noise to warn his fellow beings whenever danger threatened,

And he 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 man had no tools,

And he built himself no houses.

He lived and died,

And left no trace of his existence except a few collar bones,

And a few pieces of his skull.

Studies 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 forepaws as hands,

And who were most probably connected with the creatures who happened to be our own immediate ancestors.

It is little enough we know,

And the rest is darkness.

Prehistoric Man Prehistoric Man begins to make things for himself.

Early man did not know what time meant.

He kept no records of birthdays or wedding anniversaries for the hour of death.

He had no idea of days or weeks or even years.

But in a general way,

He kept track of the seasons,

For he had noticed that a cold winter was invariably followed by the mild spring,

That spring grew into the hot summer when fruits ripened and the wild ears of corn were ready to be eaten,

And that summer ended when sudden gusts of wind swept the leaves from the trees and the number of animals were getting ready for the long,

Hibernal sleep.

But now something unusual and rather frightening had happened.

Something was the matter with the weather.

The warm days of summer had come very late.

The fruits had not ripened.

The tops of the mountains which used to be covered with grass now lay deeply hidden underneath a heavy burden of snow.

Then one morning,

A number of wild people,

Different from the other creatures who lived in that neighborhood,

Came wandering down from the region of the high peaks.

They looked lean and appeared to be starving.

The others sounds which no one could understand.

They seemed to say that they were hungry.

There was not food enough for both of the old inhabitants and the newcomers.

When they tried to stay more than a few days,

There was a terrible battle with claw-like hands and feet and whole families were killed.

The others fled back to their mountain slopes and died in the next blizzard.

But the people in the forest were greatly frightened.

All the time the days grew shorter and the nights grew colder than they ought to have been.

Finally,

In a gap between the two high hills,

There appeared a tiny speck of greenish ice.

Rapidly it increased in size.

A gigantic glacier came sliding downhill.

Huge stones were being pushed into the valley with the noise of a dozen thunderstorm torrents of ice,

And mud and blocks of granite suddenly trembled among the people of the forest and killed them while they slept.

Century old trees were crushed into kindling wood,

And then it began to snow.

It snowed for months and months.

All the plants died,

And the animals fled in search of the southern sun.

Man hoisted his young upon his back and followed them,

But he could not travel as fast as the wilder creatures,

And he was forced to choose between quick thinking or quick dying.

He seems to have preferred a former,

For he has managed to survive the terrible glacier periods which upon four different occasions threatened to kill every human being on the face of the earth.

In the first place it was necessary that man clothe himself lest he freeze to death.

He learned how to dig holes and covered them with branches and leaves,

And in these traps he caught bears and hyenas,

Which he then killed with heavy stones,

And whose skins he used as coats for himself and his family.

Next came the housing problem.

This was simple.

Many animals were in the habit of sleeping in dark caves.

Man now followed their example,

Drove the animals out of their worm-homes,

And claddened them for their own.

Even so,

The climate was too severe for most people,

And the old and the young died at a terrible rate.

Then a genius bethought himself of the use of fire.

Once while out hunting,

He had been caught in a forest fire.

He remembered that he had been almost roasted to death by the flames.

Thus far fire had been an enemy.

Now it became a friend.

A dead tree was dragged to the cave and lighted by means of smoldering branches from a burning wood.

This turned the cave into a cozy little room.

And then one evening a dead chicken fell into the fire.

It was not rescued until it had been well roasted.

Man discovered that meat tasted better when cooked,

And he then there discarded one of the old habits which he had shared with the other animals and began to prepare his food.

In this way thousands of years passed.

Only the people with the cleverest brains survived.

They had to struggle day and night against cold and hunger.

They were forced to invent tools.

They learned how to sharpen stones into axes and how to make hammers.

They were obliged to put up large stores of food for the endless days of the winter.

And they found that clay could be made into bowls and jars and hardened in the rays of the sun.

And so the glacial period,

Which had threatened to destroy the human race,

Became its greatest teacher because it forced man to use his brain.

Thank you very much for listening this far.

This is only part one of this book.

If you wish to listen further,

I will be releasing a new part soon enough.

If by the time you are listening to this,

The next part has already been released,

Then please go and listen to that as well.

Thank you very much.