All language subtitles for BBC.Life.on.Earth.13of13.The.Compulsive.Communicators.1080p.x265.AAC.MVGroup.org_track3_[eng]

Why are you going that way?

You and I belong to the most
widespread and dominant species of
animal on Earth.

We live on the ice caps at the pole
and the tropical jungles at the Equator.

We've climbed the highest mountain and
dived deep into the seas.

We've even left the Earth and set foot
on the moon.

And we're certainly the most numerous
large animal.

There are something like
4,000 million of us today.

And we've reached this position with
meteoric speed.

It's all happened within the last
2,000 years or so.

We seem to have broken loose from the
restrictions

that have governed the activities and
numbers of other animals.

Why should this be?

Well, the story starts back in Africa.

Ten million years ago, much of East
and Central Africa was covered by wide
open plains,

just as it is today, and living there
were herds of grazing animals.

The ancestors of the antelope
originally lived in the forest.

Other kinds of animals from there also
ventured out into the open

in search of food.

Apes had come down from the trees.

Like the vervet monkeys of today,

those ancient apes probably stayed
close to the fringes of the forest at
first,

but regularly wandered out into the
open to collect insects, seeds and
other morsels.

The earliest of these ground-living
apes were not much bigger than vervets,

but slowly, as they colonised the
grasslands, they became better adapted
to life in the open

and they grew somewhat in size.

About three million years ago, there
were several species of them on the
African plains,

and this is the reconstructed skull of
one of them.

It has several characters which are an
inheritance

from the tree-living, ape-like
ancestors of this creature.

We can guess that its sense of smell,
for example, wasn't very good.

The nasal cleft is quite small.

On the other hand, its vision was very
good. It had two large, forward-facing
eyes.

Its brain, while quite large, is only
about half the size of that of modern man.

Although the teeth are missing in this
specimen,

we know from others that they were
remarkably even

and lacked the two long
downward-pointing fangs which are
sometimes present

and which lock the lower jaw in
position.

So we can guess this animal could move
its lower jaw from side to side

and was able to chew roots and nuts as
well as eating flesh and maybe fruit.

Their fossilised bones are very rare.

We still don't know how many kinds
there were or how they were related.

But on one thing, all who've studied
their remains are agreed.

Those ancient apes included the
ancestors of mankind.

They can be called, in fact, apemen.

And grasslands like these must have
been the cradle of humanity.

Out on the grasslands, the talents the
apemen's ancestors developed to cope
with life in the trees

were put to other purposes.

Hands, once used for gripping
branches,

were not much use for burrowing or
tearing flesh.

But as time passed, they became more
precise and dexterous in their grip

than any other primate's, and very
like our own.

And these enabled the apemen to pluck
not only leaves and fruit

but also to gather relatively fiddly
morsels - nuts, seeds and insects.

The apemen were still quite small and
largely defenceless.

This was a serious handicap,

for life on the open plain was
dangerous.

As well as the harmless herds, there
were hunters around.

- LION GROWLS

- The only way of escaping such
enemies

was either to run fast, which the
apemen weren't very good at,

or to climb a tree, of which there
were not many.

So it obviously was of the greatest
importance to get the earliest
possible warning of danger.

Their ancestors' life in the trees led
to a reduction in their sense of smell

but extremely good vision.

So the apemen must have reared up to
get a good view of their surroundings.

And the vervets, faced with a similar
problem, adopt just the same solution.

It's unlikely the apemen stood erect
as a way of increasing speed,

for running on four feet is a much
swifter way of getting around.

A vervet can outpace any two-legged
primate.

But if you habitually rear on your
hind legs, you can use hands for other
things,

and one modern ape, the chimpanzee,
does just that.

Chimps are the only animals that
defend themselves with weapons like
this.

- ANGRY CHATTERING

- There's every reason to suppose
those early apemen could throw sticks
and stones

just as modern chimps can.

Indeed, they would be in need of every
form of defence they could get

because their teeth were small and
they had no claws.

So, if threatened by a predator, they
would pick up a stick

to try and defend themselves out on
these African plains, as indeed I
would.

And, what's more, with this in their
hands,

they would stand some chance of
driving off a predator from its kill

in order to claim the meat for
themselves.

And eating meat has a lot to be said
for it.

Getting all your sustenance from
leaves is laborious and
time-consuming.

They have comparatively little
nourishment in proportion to their bulk.

So zebras are compelled to spend
nearly half of their days grazing

in order to get all the
food that they require.

The flesh-eaters, on the other hand,
have a much lazier life.

Meat is so nourishing that lions only
need to eat every two days or so,

and then only for about half an hour.

Doubtless, leisure had its appeal to
the apemen too.

Whereas lions simply sleep, maybe the
inquisitive apemen

used their spare time to socialise, to
play, to create.

A kill on the plains, no matter who
makes it, attracts all kinds of
flesh-eaters.

A whole pride of lions may find more
than they need in a single zebra
carcass.

One way or another, everything is
consumed,

even the tail.

And when the biggest and most powerful
have taken all they want,

there are plenty of scavengers to
clear up the remains.

Well, I only had vultures to deal with
that time, and I didn't even need a
stick.

If there'd been hyenas, I guess I
would have needed it, but I could have
got rid of them.

And maybe if I'd had a few companions,
I could have shifted a pride of lions.

But having got here, how could an
apeman with small teeth

manage to get into a carcass like
this?

Well, he could take a stone and...

And it's already cutting, and this is
really a quite ordinary stone,

but one that has just been chipped
here on either side to produce a
cutting edge.

And just such stones have been found
with the skeletons of the earliest
apemen

of about two million years ago.

So, with a chipped stone, a stick and
a pair of manipulative hands,

the apemen could have survived out on
the plains as hunters.

This state of affairs lasted for
several million years.

Slowly, the apeman became better at
walking.

His legs lengthened to increase his
stride,

and he grew to a height of about five
and a half feet.

To mark his new stance, science has
given him a new name.

Homo erectus - "upright man".

The foot acquired an arch to give a
spring to his stride,

and his first toe grew to take the
thrust of the foot.

The name "man" here has no sexist
implications.

It's the scientific name for the genus
to which these women, children and men
belonged.

And a million years ago, they spread
widely over the African plain.

Their fossilised remains are very rare,

for bodies lying out in the open are
eaten by scavengers

and bones weather into dust.

But stone is much more durable, and in
some places, the tools made by upright man

still litter the ground in huge numbers.

From them, we can see he was using his
dexterous hands with increasing skill.

Almost every one of these stones,
which have washed out from that bank
over there,

have been worked by man in one way or
another.

Some of them are far more elaborate
than anything produced by the apemen.

Like this one, for example.
Beautifully chipped.

This was probably a hand axe, used for
digging up roots.

And then there are cleavers like this
with a flat cutting edge.

They may have been used in butchering
animals, cutting flesh and stripping skin.

These aren't the only tools.

This rounded stone has not been
rounded by a stream, which would
produce smooth surfaces,

but carefully chipped,

and it's probable that these rounded
stones, of which huge numbers have
been found here,

were used either for pounding
vegetables of some kind

or as weapons.

And the reason we suppose they were
used as weapons

is because also on this site have been
found great numbers of animal bones.

This and most of the bones found on
this site belonged to an extinct baboon

that was even bigger than the living baboon.

Most of these bones, like this
fragment from the lower jaw, there are
the teeth,

have actually been split open in order
to get out the marrow.

This remarkable site provides a lot of
evidence about the nature of upright
man.

The stone from which tools are made,
and there's around a ton of them,

doesn't occur naturally within 30km of
here.

So all these stones must have been
brought here deliberately by the people,

and that suggests foresight and planning.

For another thing, the baboon they
hunted must have been a ferocious animal.

I don't imagine there are many men who
would fancy the idea of going out

and trying to hunt a baboon armed with
a few cobblestones.

And yet the extinct baboon was even
bigger and presumably more ferocious.

So it seems likely that the early
people hunted in teams.

Teamwork, foresight, planning.

That argues that they had some
considerable skill in communicating
among themselves.

- SHOUTING

- Letting others know how you feel is
a basic part of communication.

No creature in the world does so more
eloquently than man,

and no organ is more visually
expressive than his face.

Even in repose, the human face sends a
message, and one we tend to take for granted.

Each face proclaims individual identity.

In teams, recognition of other members
is of great importance.

A hunting dog in a pack proclaims its
identity by its own smell.

Primates, with their reduced sense of
smell but very acute vision,

do it by the infinite variety of their faces.

We have more separate muscles in our
faces than any other animal.

So we can move it in a variety of ways
no other animal can equal.

And not only convey mood but send
precise signals.

By the expression on our face, we can
call people and send them away,

ask questions and return answers
without a word being spoken.

Eyebrows are particularly eloquent.

We can use them as question marks and
as greetings.

But are our gestures recent
conventions we've learned from one
another?

Or are some inherited from our remote
ancestors?

Did upright man formulate his hunting
plans by pointing and nodding

and express his delight with a smile?

If we could meet modern men who have
never been in contact with our world

and discover whether we had signals in common,

then we might find clues to the answer.

Ten years ago, I had the chance to do
just that.

A patrol led by an Australian
government officer

was going to cross one of the last
patches of unexplored country in
central New Guinea.

And I went with it.

The tribesmen who came with us said
there were people living in these
forests.

They saw them rarely and knew only one
word of their language, their name.

Biame.

But no European had ever seen them.

Biame!

We walked for about a week without
meeting anyone, and then one morning

the Biame quietly appeared.

Biame!

With gestures, they seemed to be
saying we were in the middle of their
territory.

They nodded in agreement, they smiled
to give reassurance.

We wanted them to bring down other
members of their group

and tried to convey this complicated
message with gestures.

Although our two societies had never
come into contact before this moment,

it seemed that many of our gestures
did have the same meaning.

These nods and smiles, frowns and
headshakes

were surely not mere conventions but
deep in us.

It seemed they used the same name for
their rivers as the tribesmen who were
with us.

Their leader counted them for us.

To do that, he used a quite different
gesture,

not a deep-seated one like a nod or a
smile, but a conventional one, that
has been learned,

and here, our cultural backgrounds
divided us.

He used the fingers of one hand for
numbers up to five.

Above five, the Biame clearly have
their own individual code.

It's easy to follow it in sequence
like this,

but the Biame also use these gestures
individually, in bargaining, for
example.

And then how would we know this
gesture meant "eight"?

This one "nine"?

But before he got to 11 he used two of
those facial expressions

that were immediately understandable
to us.

Bafflement, because we got the names
wrong,

and amusement at our stupidity.

Although we belonged to such different
societies

and the only words we had in common
were some names,

we had exchanged complicated messages
using gestures inherited from our
common past.

Gestures that may well have been used
before the emergence of our own
species

by our distant ancestors, upright man.

For a long time, upright man lived
only in Africa,

as far as we can tell from evidence
found so far.

But slowly his numbers increased and
he began to extend his territories.

About a million years ago, he moved
north into the Nile valley

and up into the Middle East.

His bones have been found in Asia
dating from about the same time

in a hill near Peking.

Others have been dug up farther south,
in Java.

And about 800,000 years ago, judging
from fossil remains,

upright man was in Europe in some
numbers.

Now the climate of Europe changed.

It got so cold, the ice caps on the
mountains and in the north expanded,

locking up so much water that the sea
level dropped,

exposing bridges of land across the
Mediterranean

and making it easier for man to
spread.

Then the weather warmed again.

Four times this happened.

The ice, even at its worst, never got
as far as these valleys in central
France

but at the peak of a glaciation, this
land, now so verdant and fruitful,

must have been bitterly cold.

And in response to that changing
climate,

men took to caves like this one.

There are literally hundreds of caves
along this valley,

and there's scarcely one that doesn't
have some sign of habitation.

Because of lots of excavations in
them, we now have a clear picture

of the sort of lives these people led.

They wore clothes made out of skins

which they sewed with bone needles
like these.

They went down and fished in the river
with bone harpoons

and they hunted with spears and
harpoons in the woods.

Their skill in working stone reached
new heights

and they had a marvellous material to
work on - flint.

Instead of making three or four blows,

some 400 to 500 precise actions were
required to get the best out of a
piece of flint.

It must have taken a lot of learning.

To chip an edge accurately, it has to
be made even.

A razor-sharp knife made in about ten
minutes.

And a deadly weapon in the hands of
these people.

They were brave and skilful hunters,

and we know from blackened stones that
they had control of fire,

which must have been a precious
possession, not just to keep warm but
to cook their meat.

This is the skull of a man

that was excavated from just near
here.

You can see his teeth for chewing that
meat are now relatively small,

so cooking was a very valuable
technique.

But it's not just the teeth that have
changed. So has the cranium.

The parts of the brain that control
speech are fully developed,

so this man had probably a fluent and
complex language.

In fact, there are virtually no
significant differences

between this man's skeleton and skull
and mine.

So anthropologists have called him,
somewhat immodestly, Homo sapiens.

"Wise man".

The huge difference that separates
this man

leaving such a cave as this and going
down to fish in the river

and a smartly-dressed executive in
Tokyo or London or New York stepping
into his car

and driving off to his office to
consult the latest computer printout

is not due to any change in the brain
or the anatomy.

It's due to the emergence of a
completely new evolutionary factor.

And the first dazzling signs of it are
miraculously preserved right here.

From the back of many of these caves,
tunnels lead down into the depths of
the earth.

And into this blackness,

finding their way by lamps with a rush
for a wick and animal fat for fuel,
went early man.

They made these long and, surely for
them, most important journeys

in order to do this, to paint.

This for me is one of the most moving
of their paintings.

It represents a stylised horse, here
its small black head with a long black
mane.

And these spots on it, which appear to
be dapples, probably have some other
meaning

because they extend beyond the outline
of the horse.

And here, perhaps most intimate and
vivid of all,

a hand-print of one of those people.

Made probably by taking a mouthful of
black paint

and blowing it over the hand like a
stencil.

These early people were superlative
artists

and drew the animals of their world
with great sensitivity and such
accuracy

that often we can identify the species
they had in mind.

These are bison, no longer to be found
in France but still surviving farther
east.

Aurochs, a kind of giant cattle now
totally extinct.

This gallery contains a procession of
animals,

among them mammoths, shaggy with long
hair.

The oldest of these paintings is
thought to be about 30,000 years old.

The youngest maybe 10,000.

That's an immense span of time.

Five times the length of the entire
history of western civilisation.

So it's unreasonable to suppose they
all, throughout this time,

served exactly the same purpose.

Some, however, may well have been
connected with a hunting magic.

By painting images of animals they
sought, the hunters tried to control
them.

Certainly, most of the images
represent animals that were hunted for
food.

It's tempting to interpret these signs
as arrows or spears.

Perhaps they were drawn during a
ritual when the men mimed the hunt
they prayed for.

And among these sensitive and accurate
drawings of animals,

there are much more mysterious
designs.

This has been interpreted as a human
figure, perhaps even a sacrifice

with spears in its flanks.

As well as these, and this is
significant for what is to come,

there are geometrical symbols like
these paired dots.

There are other odd shapes that occur
again and again.

What these abstract symbols signify we
have no idea,

but the fact they occur at all is
significant for what is to come,

even though we don't know exactly what
they mean.

In one place in the world, however,

we can discover why a nomadic hunting
people paint on rock in caves

because here, in northern Australia,
the aborigines still do so.

They too portray the animals they hunt
for food.

Some are drawn as part of rituals to
maintain the animals' fertility.

Others are made during ceremonies
where people recount stories of their
creation.

For this cave is a sacred place for
them.

On the back of it, they've painted the
image of one of their great creator
spirits.

It lies on its side, its head to the
left, its legs stretching out to the
right.

And aborigines also draw abstract
symbols.

These lines and dots are not aimless
doodles.

They represent particular things.

Homo sapiens, "wise man", has made a
huge step forward in his ability to
communicate.

He's discovered how to represent
objects not by their likeness

but by symbols.

In this great frieze, the educated eye
of a man of the tribe

can read a sacred legend

telling how the great creator spirit
moved across the land in the beginning
of time

and showed men how to make spears and
go hunting.

The ability to distinguish the edible
from the poisonous,

to track and kill animals, to discover
food in all but the most sterile of
lands,

enabled "wise man" to spread
throughout the world.

Many groups of people today still live
entirely by these ancient skills.

The aborigines, by understanding their
land with an intimacy that baffles
outsiders,

can survive in desert country where
strangers would die of starvation in
days.

In the Kalahari desert, the bushmen
too live in a similar way,

with the help of similar skills.

They are the most expert of hunters.

They know how to prepare poison to tip
their arrows

and with them bring down big game,
like a giraffe,

though the hunt may take many days and
demand the greatest bravery and
endurance.

Bushman women can recognise the
characters of a leaf

that tells the knowledegable that this
spindly stem

leads to a tuber in the ground that is
loaded with water in the most severe
of droughts.

As "wise man" spread through the
world, so his body responded to his
surroundings.

The rays of the sun in excess can be
harmful

and many dwellers in the tropics
acquired black pigment in their skins

which protected them from it.

But too little sunshine can also be
bad for you.

The body needs it for vitamins,

so in northern lands, in Lapland, for
instance, races possess fair skins.

In Asia, there developed a race with
olive skins and slanting eyes.

Some of them migrated across the
Bering Strait into the New World

and down to the rainforests of South
America, where they still live.

They too are skilled hunters, and some
still find all they need

from the wild animals and plants of
their forests.

This was the way all human beings in
the world existed until comparatively
recently.

Nowhere were they numerous.

Their expectation of life was short.

Their birth rate and the survival of
their children

kept in check by the scarcity of food
and the hazards of their lives.

But then came a revolution, one that
was to start that explosion of man's
population.

And the trigger was this.

A wild form of wheat or barley

that grew then as now on the fertile
deltas of the Middle East.

It's got a lot of seeds, easily
separated from the husks and full of
nourishment.

About 10,000 years ago, man realised

he no longer need go searching for the
wild plant.

He could take these seeds and plant
them.

And then he would no longer be
compelled to follow the wandering
life.

He could settle down.

Some animals too could be domesticated
and kept permanently around his
settlements,

to be slaughtered when he wanted meat.

So human beings were able to build
permanent homes in groups close by one
another.

And around the eastern end of the
Mediterranean,

in the Middle East and India, small
villages appeared.

The villages grew into towns,

and by 5,000 years ago, there were
great cities like this one, Uruk,

whose ruins have been excavated from
the sands of Iraq.

It held several thousand people. Its
citizens built walls around it for
protection,

ordered their streets, dug canals to
protect from floods.

And in the centre of their city, they
built their temple, the ziggurat,

an artificial mountain made out of
brick,

bonded together with layers of reeds.

Clearly, to build such a carefully
designed monument as this on such a
scale,

the people had to have real
organisation.

And they must have led complicated
lives too,

for not only were they skilled
architects, but they were farmers,

they made pottery, fragments of it are
all over this site,

they were traders and they probably
also paid taxes.

At all events, they found it necessary

to have some way of recording their
affairs and transactions,

because in this very site has been
found this.

The earliest known piece of writing.

It's thought to be some sort of tally
recording the issue of rations

over a five-day period.

Each column represents one day, and,
incidentally, reads vertically.

The symbols are a mixture of pictorial
representations

and abstract designs.

This triangular one is purely abstract
and is believed to mean "bread".

Whereas this sign looks like and may
mean a wheatsheaf.

The different-shaped dots in front
refer to the quantities of each
commodity.

This tablet was baked over 5,000 years
ago.

But that, in the timescale that we've
been thinking on,

is comparatively recently, a mere 100
or so generations.

When he marked and baked this,

man turned the surge of evolution into
a new course.

Now, for the first time, it was
possible for a person

to transmit information quite
independent of his own existence or
presence.

And so an individual man was able to
pass on information

about his failures and successes, his
insights, his strokes of genius,

his accumulation of humdrum facts,

from one individual to the community,

from a community to a generation, and
for generations beyond.

The discovery of writing was made
independently by many people
worldwide.

So the question inevitably arises -

are we fundamentally and crucially
different from all other living
organisms?

Or is there an overall pattern into
which we and all other animals
naturally fit?

All living things are continually
influenced by information from the
past.

And the more information they get, the
better they can solve their problems.

Every animal receives that information
inherited from its parents,

and coded not in letters but in
chemicals - DNA.

These are models of just one section
of that giant molecule of DNA,

vastly enlarged.

Many molecules go to make genes,

and genes together can be regarded as
a library of instructions to an animal

on how to solve the problems of
survival.

Clusters of genes in the primordial
seas

began to reproduce some 3,500 million
years ago. Bacteria.

If we represent the immense period of
time between then and now by one year,

and this stage is its first moment,

then more complex micro-organisms like
these

didn't develop until the middle of
August, over 1,000 million years
later.

As time passed, organisms accumulated
more genes that could carry the
instructions

necessary for building bigger and more
complex bodies,

which in turn could solve more
difficult problems of survival.

And so animals found new ways of
living in the seas.

At the beginning of November, the
first backboned creatures appeared.

Towards the end of that month, the
first animals left the water

and colonised the land.

And now the pace quickened.

The backboned animals also invaded the
land.

By the beginning of December, some had
acquired waterproof skins

and broken their dependence on water.

During the middle of December, one
group could generate heat in their
bodies,

and had elaborated their scales into
feathers.

The first furry warm-blooded creatures
appeared around the same time,

but it wasn't until 25th December that
the dinosaurs disappeared

and the mammals came into their own.

The information and instructions
carried by the DNA in the sex cells
was supplemented.

The young mammal, dependent on its
mother for milk and protected by her,

begins to learn from her how to deal
with the world around it.

So animal communities developed
traditions, cultures,

and were able to transmit them from
one generation to another.

Now the skills acquired during an
individual's lifetime

need no longer die with it.

Some at least could be handed on,
supplementing the inborn genetically
programmed skills.

In the early morning of December 31st,

apes and apemen appeared.

And we arrived about two minutes
before the end of that last day.

No creature is so dependent upon its
mother for such a large proportion of
its life

as is the human baby.

And through language, none learns so
much from her or so quickly.

- Come on. You're not very awake, are
you?

- Our spoken language is enormously
more subtle and informative

than any other system of communication
in the animal world.

It's almost impossible to prevent a
baby from acquiring it.

Are you going to open that?

By the age of five, every child will
have mastered the meaning of 6,000
words

and is able to operate 1,000 rules of
grammar, an astonishing feat of
learning.

As their world expands, they learn not
only from their parents

but other children and adults,

so that the whole accumulated
experience of the community can become
theirs.

By means of words, skills can be
rapidly taught and problems quickly
explained and solved.

- Make sure it's nice...and strong

and helps the pot.

- Nitrogen...dioxide.

- And they learn, too, to comprehend
symbols that not only represent spoken
words

but completely new concepts.

- Di-nitrogen oxide.

Now, as in our previous experiment,
we're going to heat lead nitrate here.

We're getting a nice flow of
colourless gas in the gas jar.

Notice the residue...

- ..Specimen to get this orientation,
and this is achieved by

this here, this control here.

- Over the past 1,000 years,

cultures have devised ways of
duplicating those symbols

so that one individual could
communicate with thousands.

Printing.

A great library can be seen as an
extension of the human brain.

But it contains far more information
than any single human memory could do.

Here are stored the insight, the
experience, the wisdom of past
generations

so that we can consult it, benefit
from it and, in turn, contribute to
it.

So we're no longer dependent on the
very slow processes of physical
evolution.

If we need to fly, we don't have to
wait millions of years

while our arms turn into wings.

Over a few generations, we can study
the problems of physics and metallurgy

and mathematics and aerodynamics,

and build ourselves aeroplanes.

As this information increases with
growing speed,

so we've developed radically new
methods of storing and retrieving it
all.

The computer, the transistor, the
microprocessor and the silicon chip,

all developed within the last decade
or so,

now give us greater power to sort our
knowledge, to link fact to fact

so that our understanding of the
nature of the world we inhabit

becomes ever more detailed and subtle.

With the help of electronics, we can
recall information

from data banks, no matter where they
are,

and we can communicate directly and
instantaneously with one another

right round the globe.

We can predict the behaviour of our
machines

and make calculations which were once
quite beyond the human brain.

And with the existence of worldwide
communications

and the use of powerful computers,

we can forecast with greater precision
that most unpredictable of events on
our planet,

its daily weather.

20,000 years ago, man drew messages
for the gods in caves.

Now he sends them to extraterrestrial
beings in the sky.

In his rockets, he puts images to
greet other beings in other galaxies

in case they exist.

Images of himself in the gesture of
welcome.

Details of his discoveries.

And photographs that he hopes may give
other intelligences elsewhere

some impression of what life is like
on Earth.

This is the last programme in this
natural history,

and it's very different from the
others

because it's been devoted to just one
animal - ourselves.

And that may have been a misleading
thing to have done.

It may have given the impression that
man was the ultimate triumph of
evolution,

that all those thousands of millions
of years of development

had no purpose other than to put man
on Earth.

There is no scientific evidence
whatsoever for such a belief.

No reason to suppose that man's stay
on Earth should be any longer than
that of the dinosaurs.

He may have learned to control his
environment,

to pass on information from one
generation to another,

but the forces of evolution that
brought him into existence here on
these African plains

are still at work elsewhere in the
world

and if man were to disappear, for
whatever reason,

there is doubtless somewhere some
small, unobtrusive creature

that would seize the opportunity and,
with a spurt of evolution, take man's
place.

But although denying a special place
in the world may be becomingly modest,

the fact remains that man has an
unprecedented control over the world
and everything in it.

And so, whether he likes it or not,

what happens next is very
largely up to him.