The Naked Ape Read Free

million years ago, following the collapse of the great age of reptiles, these little insect-eaters began to venture out into new territories. There they spread and grew into many strange shapes. Some became plant-eaters and burrowed under the ground for safety, or grew long, stilt-like legs with which to flee from their enemies. Others became long-clawed, sharp-toothed killers. Although the major reptiles had abdicated and left the scene, the open country was once again a battlefield.
    Meanwhile, in the undergrowth, small feet were still clinging to the security of the forest vegetation. Progress was being made here, too. The early insect-eaters began to broaden their diet and conquer the digestive problems of devouring fruits, nuts, berries, buds and eaves. As they evolved into the lowliest forms of primates, their vision improved, the eyes coming forward to the front of the face and the hands developing as food-graspers. With three-dimensional vision, manipulating limbs and slowly enlarging brains, they came more and more to dominate their arboreal world.
    Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five million years ago, these pre-monkeys had already started to evolve into monkeys proper. They were beginning to develop long, balancing tails and were increasing considerably in body size. Some were on their way to becoming leaf-eating specialists, but most were keeping to a broad, mixed diet. As time passed, some of these monkey-like creatures became bigger and heavier. Instead of scampering and leaping they switched to brachiating—swinging hand over hand along the underside of the branches. Their tails became obsolete. Their size, although making them more cumbersome in the trees, made them less wary of ground-level sorties.
    Even so, at this stage—the ape phase—there was much to be said for keeping to the lush comfort and easy pickings of their forest of Eden. Only if the environment gave them a rude shove into the great open spaces would they be likely to move. Unlike the early mammalian explorers, they had become specialised in forest existence. Millions of years of development had gone into perfecting this forest aristocracy, and if they left now they would have to compete with the (by this time) highly advanced ground-living herbivores and killers. And so there they stayed, munching their fruit and quietly minding their own business.
    It should be stressed that this ape trend was for some reason taking place only in the Old World. Monkeys had evolved separately as advanced tree-dwellers in both the Old and the New World, but the American branch of the primates never made the ape grade. In the Old World, on the other hand, ancestral apes were spreading over a wide forest area from western Africa, at one extreme, to south-eastern Asia at the other. Today the remnants of this development can be seen in the African chimpanzees and gorillas and the Asian gibbons and orangutans. Between these two extremities the world is now devoid of hairy apes. The lush forests have gone.
    What happened to the early apes? We know that the climate began to work against them and that, by a point somewhere around fifteen million years ago, their forest strongholds had become seriously reduced in size. The ancestral apes were forced to do one of two things: either they had to cling on to what was left of their old forest homes, or, in an almost biblical sense, they had to face expulsion from the Garden. The ancestors of the chimpanzees, gorillas, gibbons and orangutans stayed put, and their numbers have been slowly dwindling ever since. The ancestors of the only other surviving ape—the naked ape—struck out, left the forests, and threw themselves into competition with the already efficiently adapted ground-dwellers. It was a risky business, but in terms of evolutionary success it paid dividends.
    The naked ape’s success story from this point on is well known, but a brief summary will help, because it is vital to keep in mind the events