simians

• retarded mid-mammals were ancestors; man not descended from

61:6.1The great event of this glacial pe­riod was the evo­lu­tion of prim­i­tive man. Slightly to the west of In­dia, on land now un­der wa­ter and among the off­spring of Asi­atic mi­grants of the older North Amer­i­can lemur types, the dawn mam­mals sud­denly ap­peared. These small an­i­mals walked mostly on their hind legs, and they pos­sessed large brains in pro­por­tion to their size and in com­par­i­son with the brains of other an­i­mals. In the sev­en­ti­eth gen­er­a­tion of this or­der of life a new and higher group of an­i­mals sud­denly dif­fer­en­ti­ated. These new mid-mam­mals—al­most twice the size and height of their an­ces­tors and pos­sess­ing pro­por­tion­ately in­creased brain power—had only well es­tab­lished them­selves when the Pri­mates, the third vi­tal mu­ta­tion, sud­denly ap­peared. (At this same time, a ret­ro­grade de­vel­op­ment within the mid-mam­mal stock gave ori­gin to the simian an­ces­try; and from that day to this the hu­man branch has gone for­ward by pro­gres­sive evo­lu­tion, while the simian tribes have re­mained sta­tion­ary or have ac­tu­ally ret­ro­gressed.)

• retarded mid-mammals were ancestors; man not descended from

62:1.1The 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.

• descendants of lemurs

62:1.3With 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.

• retarded mid-mammals were ancestors; man not descended from

62:3.11Con­tem­po­ra­ne­ously with the birth of these Pri­mates twins, an­other cou­ple—a pe­cu­liarly re­tarded male and fe­male of the mid-mam­mal tribe, a cou­ple that were both men­tally and phys­i­cally in­fe­rior—also gave birth to twins. These twins, one male and one fe­male, were in­dif­fer­ent to con­quest; they were con­cerned only with ob­tain­ing food and, since they would not eat flesh, soon lost all in­ter­est in seek­ing prey. These re­tarded twins be­came the found­ers of the mod­ern simian tribes. Their de­scen­dants sought the warmer south­ern re­gions with their mild cli­mates and an abun­dance of trop­i­cal fruits, where they have con­tin­ued much as of that day ex­cept for those branches which mated with the ear­lier types of gib­bons and apes and have greatly de­te­ri­o­rated in con­se­quence.

62:3.12And 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.

62:3.13Mod­ern man and the simi­ans did spring from the same tribe and species but not from the same par­ents. Man’s an­ces­tors are de­scended from the su­pe­rior strains of the se­lected rem­nant of this mid-mam­mal tribe, whereas the mod­ern simi­ans (ex­cept­ing cer­tain pre-ex­is­tent types of lemurs, gib­bons, apes, and other mon­key­like crea­tures) are the de­scen­dants of the most in­fe­rior cou­ple of this mid-mam­mal group, a cou­ple who only sur­vived by hid­ing them­selves in a sub­ter­ranean food-stor­age re­treat for more than two weeks dur­ing the last fierce bat­tle of their tribe, emerg­ing only af­ter the hos­til­i­ties were well over.

• some Andonites mated with

63:1.4The de­ci­sion of An­don and Fonta to flee from the Pri­mates tribes im­plies a qual­ity of mind far above the baser in­tel­li­gence which char­ac­ter­ized so many of their later de­scen­dants who stooped to mate with their re­tarded cousins of the simian tribes. But their vague feel­ing of be­ing some­thing more than mere an­i­mals was due to the pos­ses­sion of per­son­al­ity and was aug­mented by the in­dwelling pres­ence of the Thought Ad­justers.