Chapter 7 Chapter 6 The Debut of Humans

A new species of animal has popped up on Earth, gradually moving outward from the heartland of Africa.They were still so rare that a hasty survey might have gone unnoticed, because the land and oceans at that time were teeming with billions of creatures.It's hard to say whether the new animal will survive, let alone thrive.In a world where so many raptors are extinct, the future of this new animal is uncertain. In the hundreds of thousands of years after the crystals landed in Africa, the apes had nothing to invent.However, they have begun to change, developing skills not possessed by any other beast.

The apes' tusks are getting smaller and smaller, because the tusks are less useful.Angled stones can be used to dig roots and cut hard flesh or fibers, which are sufficient to replace sharp teeth and produce inestimable effects.The apes no longer starve because their teeth are wounded or worn out; the crudest tool can add many years to their life.As soon as the fangs were removed, their facial shapes began to change; the protruding mouth retracted, the big jaw became more delicate, and the mouth could make a clearer voice.Language is still a million years away, but the first steps toward language development have already been taken.

At the same time, the world began to change.At intervals of 200,000 years each time, four ice ages swept across the land, leaving scars across the globe.Except for the tropics, all creatures that left their ancestors' hometown prematurely disappeared under the attack of glaciers; like screening seeds, all creatures that could not adapt to glaciers were eliminated. The glaciers disappeared, and most of the earliest living things on the earth died out-including the apes.Unusually, the apes left descendants; they didn't simply die out—they got transformed.The toolmaker is reborn from his tool.

Through the use of clubs and flints, the apes developed a dexterity of hands unique to all beasts, which enabled them to make better tools, which in turn advanced their limbs and their minds.This is a process of continuous acceleration and accumulation.The ultimate result was the human race. Regardless of the beasts who only know the present, human beings have acquired the knowledge of the past and began to explore the future. Human beings are also learning to control nature at the same time; due to the mastery of fire.Humans laid the groundwork for technology, far removed from their brutes' origins.Stone implements gave way to steel bars, which gave way to iron implements.Hunting was replaced by family business.Clans grew into villages, and villages into towns.Language is immortalized by inscriptions on stone, pottery and paper leather.Philosophy, and even religion, invented by human beings immediately.It is not inaccurate that they put their own image in the sky, and it is not inaccurate to say that they are in harmony with the gods.

Man's physical strength is getting weaker and weaker, and his means of attack are becoming more and more terrible.From stone tools, copper tools, iron tools, and steelmaking, human beings have made all kinds of piercing and slashing weapons, and they have long learned to kill enemies at a long distance.Spears, bows and arrows, guns, and even ballistic missiles have enabled humans to master weapons with infinite distance and near-infinite power. However, today, when weapons exist, people are already precarious.