Now the story turns toward the storyteller.
For among Euarchos' children—the tree-dwellers
Of the northern forests—there was a better
And more complicated line, the sellers
Of the mammalian future: the primates,
Primos, whose story is the preface
To the human chapter—the primates
Whose every adaptation was the surface
Of the coming mind.
It began in the trees.
The Paleocene's forests grew tall and warm
And canopy-closed—and the expertise
Of living in the trees required a form
Of perception different from the ground:
The branch is narrow and the fall is far,
And the animal who leaps must be found
Precise in its judgment of where the bar
Of the next branch is—and for this
The primate evolved the forward-facing eye.
Two eyes looking in the same direction's kiss
Of overlapping vision made the high
And narrow world of the canopy
Three-dimensional: depth perception,
The binocular geometry
Of two views merged, the interception
Of the parallax that told the brain
How far away the branch was—this
Was the primate's first domain
Of innovation: the visual abyss
Replaced by the calculated leap.
And the hand—Primos grew the grasping hand,
The opposable thumb's deep
And revolutionary command
Of precision: to hold the branch
Not with the claw's hook but with the hand's
Encircling grip, the avalanche
Of manipulation that the bands
Of finger and of thumb allow—
The primate could grasp, could pick,
Could manipulate, could show
The brain a world of objects, the trick
Of the hand feeding the mind with touch
And the mind directing the hand with intent.
The brain grew. Not overnight—no clutch
Of neurons doubled in a single event—
But slowly, the primate's brain expanded
Beyond the mammalian average, the cortex
Folding and refolding, the demanded
Computing power of the vortex
Of the canopy's social and spatial world
Requiring more processing, more memory,
More prediction—and the furled
And wrinkled cerebrum's inventory
Grew to accommodate the need.
Lemuros—the ghost-eyed one—was sent
To Madagascar when that island's seed
Was cut from Africa, the continent
Drifting away with its cargo of early primates
Who would never see the mainland again—
And in that isolation the Madagascar fates
Produced the lemur's radiation: the den
Of the aye-aye's skeletal finger tapping
For grubs, the ring-tailed lemur's social
Troops, the indri's eerie clapping
Song across the forest—the coastal
Island that became the living museum
Of what the primate was before the monkey came.
Tarsios—the big-eyed one—the Te Deum
Of the nocturnal hunter, the frame
Of a tiny primate whose enormous eyes
Filled half the skull, each eye as large
As the brain behind it—the nighttime prize
Of vision in near-darkness, the charge
Of the tarsier's hunting leap was guided
By those eyes that gathered every photon
The forest's darkness had provided—
The tarsier was the proton
Of the primate line: small, ancient, fierce,
A hunter of insects in the dark
Whose lineage the deeper time would pierce
And carry forward—the patriarch's mark
Of what the primate was before
The daylight and the color and the social
World of the monkey opened the door
To something new—but the asocial
And ancient tarsier kept the vigil
Of the early primate's way.
And Aegyptopithos—the Egyptian fossil
Who announced the dawn of the anthropoid day:
The first true higher primate, the bridge
Between the prosimian and the monkey,
Found in the Fayum Depression's ridge
In Africa—the chunky
And small-brained ancestor of everything
That would come after: monkey, ape, and man.
Honor Primos—the tree-dwelling, hand-grasping,
Forward-seeing, brain-expanding clan
Who began the longest approach to consciousness
That evolution has ever made—
Not knowing where it led, the cautiousness
Of the branch-to-branch's careful trade
Laying the foundation for the hand
That would one day hold a pen, and the eye
That would one day read the stars, and the grand
And folded brain that would one day ask why.