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Two creatures – a single ancestor. Each is a product of 5 million years of genetic alteration and evolutionary development. Each has gone through changes – artificial and natural – imposed from outside and from within – until neither resembles in the least the common ancestral creature. The name of the ancestral creature was Homo sapiens. It was ourselves.

Copyright © 1990 by Dougal Dixon

Illustrations copyright © 1990 by Philip Hood

All rights reserved. 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.

For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010

Design by Ben Cracknell

ISBN 0-312-03560-8

First edition

First printing

Printed and bound in Italy

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.

C. K. Brain

FOREWORD by Brian Aldiss

It has become necessary to look into the future.

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. Only a brief while after that, the apelike things acquired language; then stories began to be told, and fantasies woven about the stars overhead.

Animals have no interest in stars. First speculations regarding the stars represented a revolution in thought. Speculations about the future, such as this book, mark another revolution.

Future speculation is of very recent origin. 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. 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.

The ability to look into the future is a recently-acquired skill. It has, in fact, all been done by mirrors: there was no seeing into the future until we could see into the past. It is the ever-changing panorama of past time which we extrapolate into future time.

The business of comprehending bygone ages was a hard lesson to learn. Fossils, those coinages of past life, were always of interest to mankind. They are mentioned by Greek writers, for instance, and certainly Herodotus recognized them as being the remains of once-living creatures, understanding that their presence in the mountains of Upper Egypt was evidence that those areas had previously been under water. Lucretius, too, in his wonderful De Rerum Natura, pours scorn on supernatural effects and speaks of the Earth as having ‘generated every living species and once brought forth from its womb the bodies of huge beasts’.