The First Human Family

63:5.1The early An­don races did not pen­e­trate very far into Asia, and they did not at first en­ter Africa. The ge­og­ra­phy of those times pointed them north, and far­ther and far­ther north these peo­ple jour­neyed un­til they were hin­dered by the slowly ad­vanc­ing ice of the third glacier.

63:5.2Be­fore this ex­ten­sive ice sheet reached France and the British Isles, the de­scen­dants of An­don and Fonta had pushed on west­ward over Eu­rope and had es­tab­lished more than one thou­sand sep­a­rate set­tle­ments along the great rivers lead­ing to the then warm wa­ters of the North Sea.

63:5.3These An­donic tribes were the early river dwellers of France; they lived along the river Somme for tens of thou­sands of years. The Somme is the one river un­changed by the glaciers, run­ning down to the sea in those days much as it does to­day. And that ex­plains why so much ev­i­dence of the An­donic de­scen­dants is found along the course of this river val­ley.

63:5.4These abo­rig­ines of Uran­tia were not tree dwellers, though in emer­gen­cies they still be­took them­selves to the tree­tops. They reg­u­larly dwelt un­der the shel­ter of over­hang­ing cliffs along the rivers and in hill­side grot­toes which af­forded a good view of the ap­proaches and shel­tered them from the el­e­ments. They could thus en­joy the com­fort of their fires with­out be­ing too much in­con­ve­nienced by the smoke. They were not re­ally cave dwellers ei­ther, though in sub­se­quent times the later ice sheets came far­ther south and drove their de­scen­dants to the caves. They pre­ferred to camp near the edge of a for­est and be­side a stream.

63:5.5They very early be­came re­mark­ably clever in dis­guis­ing their par­tially shel­tered abodes and showed great skill in con­struct­ing stone sleep­ing cham­bers, dome-shaped stone huts, into which they crawled at night. The en­trance to such a hut was closed by rolling a stone in front of it, a large stone which had been placed in­side for this pur­pose be­fore the roof stones were fi­nally put in place.

63:5.6The An­don­ites were fear­less and suc­cess­ful hunters and, with the ex­cep­tion of wild berries and cer­tain fruits of the trees, lived ex­clu­sively on flesh. As An­don had in­vented the stone ax, so his de­scen­dants early dis­cov­ered and made ef­fec­tive use of the throw­ing stick and the har­poon. At last a tool-cre­at­ing mind was func­tion­ing in con­junc­tion with an im­ple­ment-us­ing hand, and these early hu­mans be­came highly skill­ful in the fash­ion­ing of flint tools. They trav­eled far and wide in search of flint, much as pres­ent-day hu­mans jour­ney to the ends of the earth in quest of gold, plat­inum, and di­a­monds.

63:5.7And in many other ways these An­don tribes man­i­fested a de­gree of in­tel­li­gence which their ret­ro­gress­ing de­scen­dants did not at­tain in half a mil­lion years, though they did again and again re­dis­cover var­i­ous meth­ods of kin­dling fire.