Hendrik Willem Van Loon - Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations

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November-2011

ISBN : 978-1-4121-5722-3

My darling boys,

You are twelve and eight years old. Soon you will begrown up. You will leave home and begin your own lives. I have beenthinking about that day, wondering what I could do to help you. Atlast, I have had an idea. The best compass is a thoroughunderstanding of the growth and the experience of the human race.Why should I not write a special history for you?

So I took my faithful Corona and five bottles of inkand a box of matches and a bale of paper and began to work upon thefirst volume. If all goes well there will be eight more and theywill tell you what you ought to know of the last six thousandyears.

But before you start to read let me explain what Iintend to do.

I am not going to present you with a textbook.Neither will it be a volume of pictures. It will not even be aregular history in the accepted sense of the word.

I shall just take both of you by the hand andtogether we shall wander forth to explore the intricate wildernessof the bygone ages.

I shall show you mysterious rivers which seem tocome from nowhere and which are doomed to reach no ultimatedestination.

I shall bring you close to dangerous abysses, hiddencarefully beneath a thick overgrowth of pleasant but deceivingromance.

Here and there we shall leave the beaten track toscale a solitary and lonely peak, towering high above thesurrounding country.

Unless we are very lucky we shall sometimes loseourselves in a sudden and dense fog of ignorance.

Wherever we go we must carry our warm cloak of humansympathy and understanding for vast tracts of land will prove to bea sterile desert--swept by icy storms of popular prejudice andpersonal greed and unless we come well prepared we shall forsakeour faith in humanity and that, dear boys, would be the worst thingthat could happen to any of us.

I shall not pretend to be an infallible guide.Whenever you have a chance, take counsel with other travelers whohave passed along the same route before. Compare their observationswith mine and if this leads you to different conclusions, I shallcertainly not be angry with you.

I have never preached to you in times gone by.

I am not going to preach to you today.

You know what the world expects of you--that youshall do your share of the common task and shall do it bravely andcheerfully.

If these books can help you, so much the better.

And with all my love I dedicate these histories toyou and to the boys and girls who shall keep you company on thevoyage through life.

HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON.

It took Columbus more than four weeks to sail fromSpain to the West Indian Islands. We on the other hand cross theocean in sixteen hours in a flying machine.

Five hundred years ago, three or four years werenecessary to copy a book by hand. We possess linotype machines androtary presses and we can print a new book in a couple of days.

We understand a great deal about anatomy andchemistry and mineralogy and we are familiar with a thousanddifferent branches of science of which the very name was unknown tothe people of the past.

In one respect, however, we are quite as ignorant asthe most primitive of men--we do not know where we came from. We donot know how or why or when the human race began its career uponthis Earth. With a million facts at our disposal we are stillobliged to follow the example of the fairy-stories and begin in theold way:

"Once upon a time there was a man."

This man lived hundreds of thousands of yearsago.

What did he look like?

We do not know. We never saw his picture. Deep inthe clay of an ancient soil we have sometimes found a few pieces ofhis skeleton. They were hidden amidst masses of bones of animalsthat have long since disappeared from the face of the earth. Wehave taken these bones and they allow us to reconstruct the strangecreature who happens to be our ancestor.

The great-great-grandfather of the human race was avery ugly and unattractive mammal. He was quite small. The heat ofthe sun and the biting wind of the cold winter had colored his skina dark brown. His head and most of his body were covered with longhair. He had very thin but strong fingers which made his hands looklike those of a monkey. His forehead was low and his jaw was likethe jaw of a wild animal which uses its teeth both as fork andknife.

He wore no clothes. He had seen no fire except theflames of the rumbling volcanoes which filled the earth with theirsmoke and their lava.

He lived in the damp blackness of vast forests.

When he felt the pangs of hunger he ate raw leavesand the roots of plants or he stole the eggs from the nest of anangry bird.

Once in a while, after a long and patient chase, hemanaged to catch a sparrow or a small wild dog or perhaps a rabbitThese he would eat raw, for prehistoric man did not know that foodcould be cooked.

His teeth were large and looked like the teeth ofmany of our own animals.

During the hours of day this primitive human beingwent about in search of food for himself and his wife and hisyoung.

At night, frightened by the noise of the beasts, whowere in search of prey, he would creep into a hollow tree or hewould hide himself behind a few big boulders, covered with moss andgreat, big spiders.

In summer he was exposed to the scorching rays ofthe sun.

During the winter he froze with cold.

When he hurt himself (and hunting animals are forever breaking their bones or spraining their ankles) he had no oneto take care of him.

He had learned how to make certain sounds to warnhis fellow-beings whenever danger threatened. In this he resembleda dog who barks when a stranger approaches. In many other respectshe was far less attractive than a well-bred house pet.

Altogether, early man was a miserable creature wholived in a world of fright and hunger, who was surrounded by athousand enemies and who was for ever haunted by the vision offriends and relatives who had been eaten up by wolves and bears andthe terrible sabre-toothed tiger.

Of the earliest history of this man we know nothing.He had no tools and he built no homes. He lived and died and leftno traces of his existence. We keep track of him through his bonesand they tell us that he lived more than two thousand centuriesago.

The rest is darkness.

Until we reach the time of the famous Stone Age,when man learned the first rudimentary principles of what we callcivilization.