the carrying strength of water and the driving force of the wind, he
quickened his fire by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first
with copper and then with iron, increased and varied and became more
elaborate and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made his
way easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social relationships
and increased his efficiency by the division of labour. He began to
store up knowledge. Contrivance followed contrivance, each making it
possible for a man to do more. Always down the lengthening record,
save for a set-back ever and again, he is doing more.... A quarter of
a million years ago the utmost man was a savage, a being scarcely
articulate, sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewn
flint or a fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family groups,
killed by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity
declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would have
sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical river
valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his little herds, a
male, a few females, a child or so.

He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led. He fled
the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the promise of sword
and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of coal; he drank water muddy
with the clay that would one day make cups of porcelain; he chewed the
ear of wild wheat he had plucked and gazed with a dim speculation in his
eyes at the birds that soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became
aware of the scent of another male and rose up roaring, his roars
the formless precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great
individualist, that original, he suffered none other than himself.

So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this ancestor of
all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly.