2 HUMANS ARE ANIMALS

1 HUMANS ARE ANIMALS

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WE USED TO BE WILD OUR STORY STARTS MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO. BACK THEN, humans were just ordinary animals. People didn't live in houses, didn't go to work or to school, and didn't have cars, computers or supermarkets. They lived in the wild, they climbed trees to pick fruit, they sniffed around looking for mushrooms and they ate worms, snails and frogs. The other animals — giraffes, zebras and baboons, for instance — weren't afraid of humans and didn't pay them much attention. Nobody imagined that one day humans would fly to the Moon, make atom bombs or write books, like the one you're reading now. At first, humans didn't even know how to make tools. Sometimes they used stones to crack nuts. But they didn't have bows and arrows, spears or knives. Humans were relatively weak animals, and whenever a lion or a bear appeared, humans had to run away — and fast! Nowadays, a lot of kids still wake up in the middle of the night, frightened that there's a monster under the bed. This is a memory from millions of years ago. In the past, there really were monsters that sneaked up on children in the night. If you heard a noise in the dark, it could have been a lion coming to eat you. If you quickly climbed to the top of a tree, you survived. But if you went back to sleep, the lion ate you. Sometimes, when lions killed a giraffe and ate it, people would watch from a safe distance. They wanted some meat for themselves, but they were too afraid to come close. Even after the lions left, the humans still didn't dare approach. Because the hyenas had moved in to eat the leftovers — and humans were afraid to pick a fight with that quarrelsome bunch. Finally, when all

the other animals had gone, the humans tiptoed carefully to the carcass to look for scraps… but the only thing left was bare bones. So they shrugged and went off in search of figs. Then one human had a great idea. She took a stone and used it to crack open a bone. Inside, she found the marrow — that's the juicy stuff in the middle of bones. She ate the marrow and thought it was delicious. Other people saw what she had done and copied her. Soon everyone was using stones to crack bones and eat marrow. Humans finally had something that only they knew how to do! Each animal has its own special talents: spiders weave webs and catch flies, bees build hives and produce honey, and woodpeckers extract grubs from tree trunks. Some animals have very weird talents. Take cleaner fish, for example. These small fish follow sharks around, waiting for the sharks to eat. Once a shark has had a little tuna snack, he opens his mouth wide, and all the cleaner fish swim inside to clean up bits of tuna stuck between the shark's teeth. The shark gets free dental care, and the cleaner fish get a good meal. Somehow, sharks recognize the cleaner fish and never eat them by mistake. Now ancient humans also had their special thing: they knew how to use stones to crack open bones so they could eat the marrow

inside. Even more important, humans learned that making tools is a good idea. They started using sticks and stones to make all kinds of other tools. Not just for cracking open bones, but for prising oysters off rocks, for digging up wild onions and carrots, and for hunting small animals like lizards and birds. Eventually, humans discovered a tool far more amazing than sticks and stones: they discovered how to use fire! Fire is ferocious and terrifying. When a lion eats a zebra, he's no longer hungry, so he lies down and sleeps. But when a fire eats a tree, it only gets hungrier, and leaps wildly from tree to tree. It can eat an entire forest in a day — leaving nothing but ash. If you try to touch or hold fire to stop it from spreading, it will burn you too. So all animals are scared of fire. They're even more afraid of fire than they are of lions. In fact, even lions are afraid of fire. But some ancient humans started taking an interest in fire. If only they could use it the same way they used sticks and stones… Do you sometimes like to just sit and stare into a fire, watching the flames dance? That's another memory from ancient humans. At first, humans approached fire very cautiously, observing it from a distance. Perhaps they discovered that if lightning set fire to a tree, they could sit round it and enjoy light and warmth. Better still, as long as the tree burned, no dangerous animal dared approach them. COOKS HAVE BIG BRAINS Humans watched fire again and again and came to understand it better. They realized that even though it was wild and ferocious, it did obey some rules. They could befriend it. They pushed a long stick towards a burning tree, and when the tip of the stick caught fire, they pulled it back again. They now had fire on a stick. The fire