Man is a singular creature Set of gifts unique among the animals Unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape,

but a shaper of the landscape The California Indians used to say at full moon, the fish came and danced on these beaches And actually, the grunion lays its eggs in the high tide muck The full moon is important, as it gives them 9 or 10 days between very high tides which will wash away hatched fish Every environment is full of such animal adaptations Millions of years of evolution has shaped the grunion to sit and fit exactly with the tides Evolution has not fitted man with any specific environment He has a crude survival kit, the paradox of human condition, which fits him to all environments Imagination reason emotional subtly and toughness make it possible not to accept the environment but to change it that series of innventions which from adge to age man has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution not biological but cultural that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks-the ascent of man human achievement and science is not a museum of finished constructions its a progress it is tempting for scientist to think that the most original ideas are the also the most recent the first experiements of alchemist also have a formative place as aws the arithmetic of the myans saronomers in central America the stonework of machupeau in andes geometery of el hamber all arresting and important for their people as the structure of DNA for us in every age there is a turning point a new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world statues of easter island the medevil clocks in Europe used to seem to say the last word about the heavens forever

there is nothing more surprising in chemistry than putting together alloids with new properties that was discovered long before birth of christ in asia splitting and fusing the atom derive from a discovery in prehistory, that stone and matter has a structure which it can be split and put together in newer ways Agriculture almost as early, domestication of wild wheat Improbable idea of taming and riding the horse These programs are a journey through intellectual history High points of mans achievement Monuments of un aging intellect Where should one begin With the creation of man We evolved in Africa near the equator I am at the garden of eden, the naval of the world The birthplace of man here at the east African rift valley Near the equater If it ever was a garden it withered long ago In the last four million years layers of volcanic dust were laid down in this area Then the rift valley buckled it so now it makes a map of tiem The animals that lived with fist man have changed so little Our ancestors would recognize the topy antelope today Although they would not recognize the hunter as their descendant The hunter has changed as little as the hunted The seribal cat still powerfull in pursuit Orax still swift in flight Human evolution began when the African climate turned to drought

Lakes shrank Forest to savvah When the aniamls adapted to the dry landscape, it became a trap in time and space The animals stayed where they were and how they were The most gracefully adapted is grans gazeille but that lovely leap has never took it out of the savannah In a parched African landscape like this at Ohmo Man first put his foot into the ground That seems a pedestrian way to begin the ascent of man Yet its critical 2 million years ago the first certain ancestor of man walked with a foot almost indistinguishable from modern man When he put his foot in the ground to walk upright Man made a commitment to a new integration of life And therefore of the limbs This skull 2 million years old found south of equater at tounge The skull has two remarkable features The foramen magnum is upright, this child held its head up The teeth are small square, not great fighting kanine of apes Means it forages with hands and not mouth Ate raw meat Make stone tools to carve and hunt Dot, called this austrolopicthecus Southern ape The human baby and being is a masaic of animal and angel The kicking reflex is there in womb, In all vertebrates At 14 months the cerebellum issues the command, stand

What are the physical gifts man must share with animals and what make him different Starting response of the runner is the same as the flight response of the gazelle All animal in action Heatbeat goes up Heart is pumping 5x as much blood as normal 90 percent fro the muscles 20 gallons of air a minute Main chemical action is to get energy for the muscles by burning sugar there But of that is lost of heat The chemical burnup is too fast, the waste pruducts that compete now foil up the blood Causes fatique and blocks the muscle action until the blood can be cleaned with frest oxygen All that is the normal metabolism of an animal in flgith The human is not driven by his immediate environment In themselves his actions make no sense at all,an exercise that is not direct to the present The athletes mind is ahead of him The pole vaulter a capsule of human abilities the grasps of the hand The arch of the foot The muscles of shoulder and pelvis The invention of the pole The concentration of the mind At the moment before leaping which gies it a stamp of humanity The size of an ape brain now is 1-1.5 ILBS By 2 million years ago the ancestors of man made two inventions Austroliptheicis, used rocks with a blunt edge to smash stuff Most of the austrolipithecus died before 20 They like all primates had long childhood still children by age 10

Thus there was a lot of orphanes Thus there must have been social structure that facilitated adoption When can we say that the precurses of man become man himself That is a delicate question such changes do not take place over night It is foolish to make them seen more sudden than they really were or argue about names We were not yet men 2 million years ago, but 1 million we were There was homo erectus Spread far beyond Africa First creature to use fire 400,000 years ago The changes in homo erectus are substantial but gradual over 1 million years Neathandertal had 3 lb brain Somwehre in the last million year the quality of tools got better Biological refinement in brain and hand Much finer manipulation needed to make and use The evolution of brain hand eeys feet the whole human frame makes mosaic of special gifts Man is not the most majestic of creatures Long before the mammls even the dinosaurs were far more splendid But he has what no other animal posses a jigsaw of facaaulites which elope of 3 billion years of life make him creative Every animal leaves traces of what it was Man leaves traces of what he created From the ancestral Australopithecus onwards man ate some meat, small animals at first Meat is a more concentrate protein than plant and eating cuts down bulk and time spend eating 2/3 Slow man can stock an adapted for flight savannah animal only by coopoperation Hunting requires conscious planning and organization by means of language And special weapons

A communal undertaking with the climax as the kill Hunting cannot support a growing population in one place Thus the savannah could only support 2 people per square mile At that density the total land surface of the earth could only support California-20 million The choice for the hunters was brutual, starve or move, they moved by prodigious distances By a million years ago they were in north Africa 700,000 jaba 400,000 china and Europe Man was a widely dispered species from an early time Even though total numbers were perhaps 1 million Man moved into the north right when the climate was turning to ice The northern climate had been temperate for several hundred million years But just as homo erectus settled in china and northern Europe a sequence of 3 ice ages emerges First, 400,000 years ago when man lived in caves Fire is found in those caves for first time The ice moved south and retreated 3 times changing the land each time
The original source of fire undoubtedly was lightning, and such fortuitously ignited blazes remained the only source of fire for aeons. For some years Peking man, about 500,000 BC, was believed to be the earliest unquestionable user of fire; evidence uncovered in Kenya in 1981 and in South Africa in 1988, however, suggests that the earliest controlled use of fire by hominids dates from about 1,420,000 years ago. Not until about 7000 BC didNeolithic man acquire reliable fire-making techniques, in the form either of drills, saws, and other friction-producing implements or of flint struck against pyrites. Even then it was more convenient to keep a fire alive permanently than to reignite it. The ice caps at their largest contained so much water that sea level dropped over 400 feet Second ice age was 200,000 Last was 100,000 This time marked first sophisticated hunting tools, spear thrower and baton Barbed harpoon Man survived the fierce test of the ice ages because he had the flexibility of mind to recognize inventions and turn them into community property

Ice ages made man depend less on plants and more on animals The riggors of hunting on the edge of ice changed the stragety of hunting Less attractive to stalk one animal however large They followed herds of animals Life on the moon The lapps of north scandinaca follow the reindeer still 30,000 people and 300 000 people and their way of life is ending To make males more manageable for draft animals, they castrate them Sami-Lapps-people just bite into one testicle and pop it without breaking the skin to avoid infection The adaption of the lapps people is not irreversible like a biological one, and indeed many of them are doing it now Why do they have dark skin? Man began with dark skin The sun makes vitamin d in his skin It would make too much if white in Africa In north man needs to let in all the sunlight there is to make enough