THE GAP

BUT THIS HAPPENED!

The blend of theory and factual evidence has brought us closer to an understanding of what is truly distinctive about human change and why it has been so quick. But there remains the nagging question of why man alone took the fourth great step of organic evolution. The fossil beds are dotted with the remains of large-brained animals that might have achieved the same thing earlier. One hundred million years ago, fifty times farther back in time than the appearance of the earliest true men comprising Homo habilis, large ammonites and other archaic relatives of the squid and octopus swam the Jurassic seas......On the land lived human-sized "dinosauroids," as the paleontologist Dale Russell has called their imaginary brilliant descendants, could have beaten man to the tape by a hundred million years, but the opportunity passed. The great cephalopods and reptiles became extinct, and large-brained mammals proliferated in their place. Ten times further back than the origin of man, the African savanna on which that unique event was to occur swarmed with numerous elephantlike forms, hyenas, monkeys, and apes. None managed to enter the self-propelling circuit of gene-culture coevolution. Millions of species passing through hundreds of millions of generations comprised of uncountable billions of individuals, faced by every conceivable environmental challenge and opportunity, shuffling astronomical numbers of genes in microevolutionary experimentation -- all this immense ferment managed to push exactly one species across the threshold and into the autocatlytic climb to advanced culture. .... Page 154/155