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In my book Chariots of the Gods? I put forward the speculative idea that 'God' had created man in his own image by means of an artificial mutation. I voiced the suspicion that homo sapiens became separated from the ape tribe by a deliberately planned mutation. I have been attacked for making this assertion. Because the tracing back of the origin and development of man has so far been limited entirely to our planet, my theory that extraterrestrial beings could have had a hand in the process is a bold one. Yet if this idea was considered within the bounds of possibility, our beautiful family tree— apes scrambled down from the trees, mutated and became the ancestors of man—would be destroyed. Since Charles Darwin (1809-1882) put forward his theory of natural selection, all fossil finds, from the skeletons of primitive apes up to homo sapiens, have seemed to be convincing arguments in favour of his theory. When the teacher Johann Carl Fuhlrott (1804-1887) discovered some old bones in the Neanderthal near Dusseldorf and used them to reconstruct 'Neanderthal Man’, who lived in the last interglacial age and at the beginning of the Wurm glaciation, i.e. from about 120,000 to 80,000 years ago, he built up his theory of ape men on the basis of this find. It caused quite a stir in scholarly circles. Disconcerted religious opponents of Fuhlrott's theory put forward the rather unconvincing argument that there could not be a fossil man, because fossil men ought not to exist. There are many other species in addition to Neanderthal man. The lower jaw of a kind of primate was found at El Fayum near Cairo. It was dated to the Oligocene Age, which was between thirty and forty million years ago. If that dating is correct, it would be proof that beings resembling man must have existed long before Neanderthal man. Fossil examples of hominids have also been found in England, They prove that we cannot say anything definite, because nearly every new find throws doubt on the datings that have just been included in our text-books. In spite of the large number of finds, it is fair to say that they give very inadequate clues to the historical continuity of the origin and development of the human race. Certainly the track of racial development from hominids to homo sapiens can be followed back clearly for millions of years, but we cannot make nearly so definite a statement about the origin of intelligence. There are minimal indications from the remote past, but they do not add up to a whole. So far I have not been fortunate enough to hear an explanation of the origin of intelligence in man that is even tolerably convincing. There is a vast number of speculations and theories about how this 'miracle' is supposed to have happened. That is why I believe that my theory is equally In the course of the thousands of millions of years of general evolution, human intelligence seems to have appeared almost overnight. If we reckon in millions of years, we can say that this event must have taken place 'suddenly’. While still anthropoids, our ancestors created what we call human culture astonishingly quickly. But intelligence must have made a sudden appearance for this to happen. Several million years passed before anthropoids came into being through natural mutations, but after that the hominids underwent a lightning-like development. All of a sudden, tremendous advances 2 - On The Track Of Life Africa, Australia, Borneo and elsewhere. What do these finds prove? entitled to a hearing.