P703:1, 62:0.1 About one million years ago the immediate ancestors of mankind made their appearance by three successive and sudden mutations stemming from early stock of the lemur type of placental mammal. The dominant factors of these early lemurs were derived from the western or later American group of the evolving life plasm. But before establishing the direct line of human ancestry, this strain was reinforced by contributions from the central life implantation evolved in Africa. The eastern life group contributed little or nothing to the actual production of the human species.
P703:2, 62:1.1 The early lemurs concerned in the ancestry of
the human species were not directly related to the pre-existent tribes of
gibbons and apes then living in Eurasia and northern Africa, whose progeny have
survived to the present time. Neither were they the offspring of the modern type
of lemur, though springing from an ancestor common to both but long since
extinct.
P703:3, 62:1.2 While these early lemurs evolved in the Western
Hemisphere, the establishment of the direct mammalian ancestry of mankind took
place in southwestern Asia, in the original area of the central life
implantation but on the borders of the eastern regions. Several million years
ago the North American type lemurs had migrated westward over the Bering land
bridge and had slowly made their way southwestward along the Asiatic coast.
These migrating tribes finally reached the salubrious region laying between the
then expanded Mediterranean Sea and the elevating mountainous regions of the
Indian peninsula. In these lands to the west of India they united with other and
favorable strains, thus establishing the ancestry of the human race.
P703:4, 62:1.3 With the passing of time the seacoast of India
southwest of the mountains gradually submerged, completely isolating the life of
this region. There was no avenue of approach to, or escape from, this
Mesopotamian or Persian peninsula except to the north, and that was repeatedly
cut off by the southern invasions of the glaciers. And it was in this then
almost paradisiacal area, and from the superior descendants of this lemur type
of mammal, that there sprang two great groups, the simian tribes of modern times
and the present-day human species.
P703:5, 62:2.1 A little more than one million years ago the
Mesopotamian dawn mammals, the direct descendants of the North American lemur
type of placental mammal, suddenly appeared. They were active little
creatures, almost three feet tall; and while they did not habitually walk on
their hind legs, they could easily stand erect. They were hairy and agile and
chattered in monkeylike fashion, but unlike the simian tribes, they were flesh
eaters. They had a primitive opposable thumb as well as a highly useful grasping
big toe. From this point onward the prehuman species successively developed the
opposable thumb while they progressively lost the grasping power of the great
toe. The later ape tribes retained the grasping big toe but never developed the
human type of thumb.
P704:1, 62:2.2 These dawn mammals attained full growth when
three or four years of age, having a potential life span, on the average, of
about twenty years. As a rule offspring were born singly, although twins were
occasional.
P704:2, 62:2.3 The members of this new species had the largest
brains for their size of any animal that had theretofore existed on earth. They
experienced many of the emotions and shared numerous instincts that later
characterized primitive man, being highly curious and exhibiting considerable
elation when successful at any undertaking. Food hunger and sex craving were
well developed, and a definite sex selection was manifested in a crude form of
courtship and choice of mates. They would fight fiercely in defense of their
kindred and were quite tender in family associations, possessing a sense of
self-abasement bordering on shame and remorse. They were very affectionate and
touchingly loyal to their mates, but if circumstances separated them, they would
choose new partners.
P704:3, 62:2.4 Being small of stature and having keen minds to
realize the dangers of their forest habitat, they developed an extraordinary
fear which led to those wise precautionary measures that so enormously
contributed to survival, such as their construction of crude shelters in the
high treetops which eliminated many of the perils of ground life. The beginning
of the fear tendencies of mankind more specifically dates from these days.
P704:4, 62:2.5 These dawn mammals developed more of a tribal
spirit than had ever been previously exhibited. They were, indeed, highly
gregarious but nevertheless exceedingly pugnacious when in any way disturbed in
the ordinary pursuit of their routine life, and they displayed fiery tempers
when their anger was fully aroused. Their bellicose natures, however, served a
good purpose; superior groups did not hesitate to make war on their inferior
neighbors, and thus, by selective survival, the species was progressively
improved. They very soon dominated the life of the smaller creatures of this
region, and very few of the older non-carnivorous monkeylike tribes survived.
P704:5, 62:2.6 These aggressive little animals multiplied and
spread over the Mesopotamian peninsula for more than one thousand years,
constantly improving in physical type and general intelligence. And it was just
seventy generations after this new tribe had taken origin from the highest type
of lemur ancestor that the next epoch-making development occurred -- the sudden
differentiation of the ancestors of the next vital step in the evolution of
human beings on Earth.
P704:6, 62:3.1 Early in the career of the dawn mammals, in the
treetop abode of a superior pair of these agile creatures, twins were born, one
male and one female. Compared with their ancestors, they were really handsome
little creatures. They had little hair on their bodies, but this was no
disability as they lived in a warm and equable climate.
P705:1, 62:3.2 These children grew to be a little over four
feet in height. They were in every way larger than their parents, having longer
legs and shorter arms. They had almost perfectly opposable thumbs, just about as
well adapted for diversified work as the present human thumb. They walked
upright, having feet almost as well suited for walking as those of the later
human races.
P705:2, 62:3.3 Their brains were inferior to, and smaller than,
those of human beings but very superior to, and comparatively much larger than,
those of their ancestors. The twins early displayed superior intelligence and
were soon recognized as the heads of the whole tribe of dawn mammals, really
instituting a primitive form of social organization and a crude economic
division of labor. This brother and sister mated and soon enjoyed the society of
several children much like themselves, all more than four feet tall and in every
way superior to the ancestral species. This new group formed the nucleus of the
mid-mammals.
P705:5, 62:3.6 Compared with the ancestral species, the
mid-mammals were an improvement in every way. Even their potential life span was
longer, being about twenty-five years. A number of rudimentary human traits
appeared in this new species. In addition to the innate propensities exhibited
by their ancestors, these mid-mammals were capable of showing disgust in certain
repulsive situations. They further possessed a well-defined hoarding instinct;
they would hide food for subsequent use and were greatly given to the collection
of smooth round pebbles and certain types of round stones suitable for defensive
and offensive ammunition.
P705:6, 62:3.7 These mid-mammals were the first to exhibit a
definite construction propensity, as shown in their rivalry in the building of
both treetop homes and their many-tunneled subterranean retreats; they were the
first species of mammals ever to provide for safety in both arboreal and
underground shelters. They largely forsook the trees as places of abode, living
on the ground during the day and sleeping in the treetops at night.
P705:8, 62:3.9 You can hardly realize by what narrow margins
your prehuman ancestors missed extinction from time to time. Had the ancestral
frog of all humanity jumped two inches less on a certain occasion, the whole
course of evolution would have been markedly changed. The immediate lemur-like
mother of the dawn-mammal species escaped death several times by mere
hairbreadth margins before she gave birth to the father of the new and higher
mammalian order. These evolving animals were the leaders of the more progressive
group of the mid-mammal species; and following their example, more than half the
tribe, embracing the more intelligent families, moved
away from this locality and began the construction of new treetop abodes
and new ground shelters -- their transient retreats in time of sudden danger.
P706:3, 62:3.12 And so it may be readily seen that man and the
ape are related only in that they sprang from the mid-mammals, a tribe in which
there occurred the contemporaneous birth and subsequent segregation of two pairs
of twins: the inferior pair destined to produce the modern types of monkey,
baboon, chimpanzee, and gorilla; the superior pair destined to continue the line
of ascent which evolved into man himself.
P706:5, 62:4.1 Going back to the birth of the superior twins,
one male and one female, to the two leading members of the mid-mammal tribe:
These animal babies were of an unusual order; they had still less hair on their
bodies than their parents and, when very young, insisted on walking upright.
Their ancestors had always learned to walk on their hind legs, but these
Primates twins stood erect from the beginning. They attained a height of over
five feet, and their heads grew larger in comparison with others among the
tribe. While early learning to communicate with each other by means of signs and
sounds, they were never able to make their people understand these new symbols.
P707:3, 62:4.4 The Primates were more human and less animal
than their mid-mammal predecessors. The skeletal proportions of this new species
were very similar to those of the primitive human races. The human type of hand
and foot had fully developed, and these creatures could walk and even run as
well as any of their later-day human descendants. They largely abandoned tree
life, though continuing to resort to the treetops as a safety measure at night,
for like their earlier ancestors; they were greatly subject to fear. The
increased use of their hands did much to develop inherent brainpower, but they
did not yet possess minds that could really be called human.
P707:5, 62:4.6 And now, after almost nine hundred generations of development, covering about twenty-one thousand years from the origin of the dawn mammals, the Primates suddenly gave birth to two remarkable creatures, the first true human beings.
P707:8, 62:5.2 These two remarkable creatures were true human beings. They possessed perfect human thumbs, as had many of their ancestors, while they had just as perfect feet as the present-day human races. They were walkers and runners, not climbers; the grasping function of the big toe was absent, completely absent. When danger drove them to the treetops, they climbed just like the humans of today would. They would climb up the trunk of a tree like a bear and not as would a chimpanzee or a gorilla.
P708:1, 62:5.3
These first human beings (and their descendants) reached full maturity at twelve
years of age and possessed a potential life span of about seventy-five years.
P708:2, 62:5.4
Many new emotions early appeared in these human twins. They experienced
admiration for both objects and other beings and exhibited considerable vanity.
But the most remarkable advance in emotional development was the sudden
appearance of a new group of really human feelings, the worshipful group,
embracing awe, reverence, humility, and even a primitive form of gratitude.
Fear, joined with ignorance of natural phenomena, is about to give birth to
primitive religion.
P708:3, 62:5.5
Not only were such human feelings manifested in these primitive humans, but many
more highly evolved sentiments were also present in rudimentary form. They were
mildly cognizant of pity, shame, and reproach and were acutely conscious of
love, hate, and revenge, being also susceptible to marked feelings of jealousy.
P708:4, 62:5.6
These first two humans -- the twins -- were a great trial to their Primates
parents. They were so curious and adventurous that they nearly lost their lives
on numerous occasions before they were eight years old. As it was, they were
rather well scarred up by the time they were twelve.
P708:5, 62:5.7
Very early they learned to engage in verbal communication; by the age of ten
they had worked out an improved sign and word language of almost half a hundred
ideas and had greatly improved and expanded the crude communicative technique of
their ancestors. But try as hard as they might, they were able to teach only a
few of their new signs and symbols to their parents.
P708:6, 62:5.8
When about nine years of age, they journeyed off down the river one bright day
and held a momentous conference. They arrived at an understanding to live with
and for each other, and this was the first of a series of such agreements which
finally culminated in the decision to flee from their inferior animal associates
and to journey northward, little knowing that they were thus to found the human
race.
P708:7, 62:5.9
The twins migrated northward to a secluded region where they escaped the
possibility of biologic degradation through admixture with their inferior
relatives of the Primates tribes.
P709:8, 62:7.1 At noon, the day after the runaway of the twins,
there occurred the initial test flash of the universe circuit signals at the
planetary reception-focus of Earth. On the third day after the elopement of the
twins, and before the Life Carrier corps departed, there arrived the Nebadon
representative of initial planetary circuit establishment.
P710:1, 62:7.2 It was an eventful day on Earth when our small
group gathered about the planetary pole of space communication received the
first message from Salvington over the newly established mind circuit of the
planet. And this first message, dictated by the chief of the corps, said:
P710:2, 62:7.3 "To the Life Carriers on Urantia --
Greetings! We transmit assurance of great pleasure on Salvington, in honor of
the registration on the headquarters of Nebadon of the signal of the existence
on Earth of mind of will dignity. The purposeful decision of the twins to flee
northward and segregate their offspring from their inferior ancestors has been
noted. This is the first decision of mind -- the human type of mind -- on earth
and automatically establishes the circuit of communication over which this
initial message of acknowledgment is transmitting."
P710:3, 62:7.4 Next over this new circuit came the instructions
for the resident Life Carriers forbidding them to interfere with the pattern of
life they had established. They were directed not to intervene in the affairs of
human progress. It should not be inferred that Life Carriers ever arbitrarily
and mechanically interfere with the natural outworking of the planetary
evolutionary plans, for they do not. But up to this time they had been permitted
to manipulate the environment and shield the life plasm in a special manner, and
it was this extraordinary, but wholly natural, supervision that was to be
discontinued.
P710:4, 62:7.5 Then the Life Carriers heard the words of their
chief and received his permission to return to home. This message contained the
official acceptance of the Life Carriers' work on Earth and absolved them from
all future criticism of any of their efforts to improve the life patterns of
Nebadon as established in the system.
P710:5, 62:7.6 These messages from Salvington formally marked
the termination of the Life Carriers' agelong supervision of the planet. For
ages they had been on duty, assisted only by the adjutant mind-spirits and the
Master Physical Controllers. And now, will, the power of choosing to worship and
to ascend, having appeared in the evolutionary creatures of the planet, they
realized that their work was finished, and their group prepared to depart. Earth
being a life-modification world, permission was granted to leave behind two
senior Life Carriers with their assistants.