man after man an anthropology of the future dougal dixon

The ability to look into the future is a recently-acquired skill. Dougal Dixon’s book is an ambitious attempt to view a future as far distant from us as those ramapithecine creatures whose fragmentary remains turn up in African fossil beds. Yet today no man can call himself cultured who does not occasionally look beyond his own lifetime and his children’s, if only to worry about where the cancerous growth of world population is going.

Speculations about the future, such as this book, mark another revolution.įuture speculation is of very recent origin. First speculations regarding the stars represented a revolution in thought. Such stories, told in the Pleistocene dark, kept the bogeyman away.Īnimals have no interest in stars.

That cluster resembled a hunter and, high above, the outlines of a great bear could be discerned. Only a brief while after that, the apelike things acquired language then stories began to be told, and fantasies woven about the stars overhead. There must have been a time, long past, when animals much like apes looked up into the night sky and wondered about the stars: what those pinpoints of light were, and what they were for. It has become necessary to look into the future. It is probably reasonable to conclude that, had it not been for temperature-based environmental changes in the habitats of early hominids, we would still be secure in some warm hospitable forest, as in the Miocene of old, and we would still be in the trees. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.įor information, address St. Illustrations copyright © 1990 by Philip HoodĪll rights reserved. The name of the ancestral creature was Homo sapiens. Each has gone through changes – artificial and natural – imposed from outside and from within – until neither resembles in the least the common ancestral creature. Each is a product of 5 million years of genetic alteration and evolutionary development. Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, once the peak of human evolution and now extinct.

Man after man an anthropology of the future dougal dixon