Stuart L. Pope, age 7, of Muncie, Indiana, for his question:
Was the cave man a gorilla?
Goodness no, he was not. The caveman was a true human being and most likely one of our very own ancestors. For as far back as we can trace, the human family has been different from any of the animals we see in zoos or in the wild.
No doubt you have seen a captive gorilla in a zoo. A certain something about him may remind you of a man. He can stand and walk on his two hind legs or squat down and use his hands to peel a banana. His face looks like one of those comic Halloween masks that pretends to be a sort of human monster. What's more, Mr. Gorilla can grin and mutter in a funny sort of human way and sometimes he has a knowing sort of human look in his eye. However, though he stands six feet tall, his huge, bulky body weighs as much as three tall men should weigh. He also is covered from top to toe with a thick coat of coarse, dark hair and when standing upright his arms reach way below his knees.
True, a man looks more like a gorilla than he looks like a lion or almost any other animal. But when you examine the features of a gorilla one by one, you see that his likeness to a man is not so great after all. And this is just his outward appearance. The mind of a gorilla cannot be compared with the mind of a man. He is a clever animal, but his smartness is not the same thing as human intelligence. True, he can reason to a degree and choose one thing from another. But the human mind can do many other things besides. The gorilla cannot possibly understand our special human minds. These special gifts set us apart from all the animals in the world. A human being can think of himself as a person and judge what sort of a person he is. When he wants to do something, he can decide whether this action would be right or wrong, wise or foolish. But none of our fellow inhabitants on earth has this capacity. This great gift belongs to the human family and to none of the animals that share our world. We know that we can reason with ourselves. And we also know that we can bring trouble upon ourselves when we go against what we know to be sensible. These are the special gifts that make us human beings. Gorillas and other animals do not have them.
Experts are not sure when the first family that could be described as human lived on the earth. It may have been a million or more years ago. But experts are sure that those early people were not gorillas, though they may have been hairier than we are and rougher in their ways.
Early man had to have a different kind of mind in order to survive, for he was not as strong or as fast as many of his enemies. So he learned to make tools and weapons to protect himself and to capture game. Slowly and patiently, he used his special mind to change the world to suit himself. This took many thousands of years but he mastered it. Every generation added something to make the world more com¬fortable for the human family. And all this was possible because the caveman was not a sort of gorilla far from it.