Page:The Urantia Book, 1st Edition.djvu/784



HIS is the story of the evolutionary races of Urantia from the days of Andon and Fonta, almost one million years ago, down through the times of the Planetary Prince to the end of the ice age.

The human race is almost one million years old, and the first half of its story roughly corresponds to the pre-Planetary Prince days of Urantia. The latter half of the history of mankind begins at the time of the arrival of the Planetary Prince and the appearance of the six colored races and roughly corresponds to the period commonly regarded as the Old Stone Age.

Primitive man made his evolutionary appearance on earth a little less than one million years ago, and he had a vigorous experience. He instinctively sought to escape the danger of mingling with the inferior simian tribes. But he could not migrate eastward because of the arid Tibetan land elevations, 30,000 feet above sea level; neither could he go south nor west because of the expanded Mediterranean Sea, which then extended eastward to the Indian Ocean; and as he went north, he encountered the advancing ice. But even when further migration was blocked by the ice, and though the dispersing tribes became increasingly hostile, the more intelligent groups never entertained the idea of going southward to live among their hairy tree-dwelling cousins of inferior intellect.

Many of man's earliest religious emotions grew out of his feeling of helplessness in the shut-in environment of this geographic situation—mountains to the right, water to the left, and ice in front. But these progressive Andonites would not turn back to their inferior tree-dwelling relatives in the south.

These Andonites avoided the forests in contrast with the habits of their nonhuman relatives. In the forests man has always deteriorated; human evolution has made progress only in the open and in the higher latitudes. The cold and hunger of the open lands stimulate action, invention, and resourcefulness. While these Andonic tribes were developing the pioneers of the present human race amidst the hardships and privations of these rugged northern climes, their backward cousins were luxuriating in the southern tropical forests of the land of their early common origin.

These events occurred during the times of the third glacier, the first according to the reckoning of geologists. The first two glaciers were not extensive in northern Europe.

During most of the ice age England was connected by land with France, while later on Africa was joined to Europe by the Sicilian land bridge. At the