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The
Story of Everything
An
abridged edition of The Urantia Book
Paper
62: The Dawn Races of Early Man
The great event of the ice age was the evolution of primitive man.
Several million years ago, North American lemurs migrated over the Bering land bridge and settled west of India. There, they united with other favorable strains from the central life implantation to produce a superior lemur type. When climatic and geologic factors isolated the region from the rest of world, the superior lemur strains were able to multiply without contamination from inferior stocks.
A little more than a million years ago, Mesopotamian dawn mammals suddenly arose from the lemurs. Dawn mammals were three feet tall, carnivorous, and had opposable thumbs and grasping big toes. They had the largest brain of any proportionately sized animal that existed to that date. The creatures experienced many emotions and instincts; the human tendency to harbor irrational fear dates from their time. Dawn mammals had a strong tribal spirit and did not hesitate to make war on their inferior neighbors. The species progressively improved by selective survival. For a thousand years they multiplied and spread throughout the Mesopotamian peninsula.
After seventy generations, twins far superior to their parents were born to a pair of the dawn mammals. These mid-mammals had larger brains and bodies, less hair, longer legs, and shorter arms than their parents. They grew to be a little over four feet in height and walked upright. The mid-mammal twins were soon recognized as leaders of the dawn-mammal tribe.
The twins instituted primitive forms of social organization and crude divisions of labor. They mated and produced twenty-one children, the nucleus of a new species. When the mid-mammals became numerous, war broke out, and dawn mammals were completely annihilated. The new species multiplied for fifteen thousand years.
Rudimentary human traits appeared in the mid‑mammals. They collected stones for weapons, fought among themselves, hoarded food, and built homes in the treetops and underground. Six hundred generations after the first mid-mammals appeared, a superior couple produced twins that were the first primates, the direct ancestors of the human race.. During the same era, another pair of mid‑mammals gave birth to a set of twins who became the ancestors of modern simians.
The superior twins were more human and less animal than their predecessors. They had less hair on their bodies, had fully developed human-type hands and feet, and spoke to each other with signs and sounds. The twins grew to be over five feet tall. Even when very young, they insisted on walking upright. At fourteen years of age, the twins left home. Their descendants lived on the Mesopotamian peninsula where they were segregated from their less intelligent cousins.
After nine hundred generations-approximately 993,000 years ago-a mutation within this Primate stock gave origin to another set of twins, the first two true human beings. They had perfect human hands and feet; they walked and ran. The twins communicated verbally as well as through signs and symbols. These first two humans felt a range of emotions including curiosity, admiration, vanity, awe, reverence, humility, pity, shame, love, hate, revenge and jealousy.
When they were about nine years old, the twins pledged their lives to each other. Two years later, they decided to elope; they left their tribe to start a new life together. This conscious decision marked the moment when the mind-spirit of wisdom first began to function on earth. The twins were recognized as true human beings, and Urantia was officially registered as an inhabited world.