Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Graham Robert Klark
Title : The future of man
Year : 1970

Link download : Graham_Robert_Klark_-_The_future_of_man.zip

FROM HUNTED TO HUNTER. The tree-dwelling ancestors of man were among the most intelligent beings of their distant age. When these creatures finally abandoned the trees and walked fully upright, freeing their hands to serve as implements of their minds as well as their bodies, there began the most successful evolutionary drive toward higher intelligence ever witnessed in Nature. As ground dwellers, these creatures were easy victims of the great predators, who hunted them down by day and surprised them at night as they huddled in clearings or in caves. They could not compete in strength, ferocity or speed with their attackers. Armed with little except their hands and what their complex brains enabled them to do with their hands, they had to think or die. For untold thousands of years most of them met early, violent deaths. Only a few in each generation had the good fortune and the ability to outwit their enemies. These favored ones survived long enough to have and rear offspring. The unwary, maladroit or stupid died early. Their offspring, if they had any, were left to starve or be eaten by predators. Natural selection was operating on the earliest types of man with grimmest intensity. Perhaps no other extant creature has undergone so severe and protracted a period of selective elimination. Yet here and there small groups managed to survive because they had the intelligence to use sticks, stones and clubs to defend themselves. Crude and puny as these implements were, they were weapons and their possessors were the first creatures who could kill without having to come in direct contact with their antagonists. As the great beasts grew larger and either faster or more formidable, man became ever more watchful, ever more successful in pitting his wits against mass and power, more and more adept at slipping out of trouble, and as the challenge grew greater, so did his brain, for the laggards on both sides got left behind in the race for the future.1 The steps in the development, of man's brain are revealed by the progressively larger braincases which appeared with the passage of centuries. Basing our judgment on the improvements in tools and weapons which took place as the intelligence of their inventors increased, we can reconstruct some of the ways in which natural selection may have worked to bring about a doubling in size of the human brain. ...