‘FREEDOM’—Chapter 8 The Greatest, Most Heroic Story Ever Told
Chapter 8:5 Early Happy, Innocent Childman
The species: the early australopithecines including Australopithecus afarensis — 3.9 to 3 million years ago
The individual now: 4, 5 and 6 years old
‘Early Happy, Innocent Childhood’ encompasses the time when the intellect becomes sufficiently able to understand the relationship between cause and effect to start actively experimenting—‘playing’—with the conscious power to self-manage and self-adjust. At this stage we are still, as it were, holding onto our mother’s apron strings with one hand while carrying out short experiments in conscious self-management with the other; we are still depending on our instinctive nurtured orientations to love for the overall management of our life. In the case of humans today, it is the ‘Look at me, Daddy, I can jump puddles’ stage where reinforcing admiration from parents of the emerging conscious ability to manage events is so important.
As mentioned, ‘Lucy’, the 3.5-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis whose skeleton so closely resembles that of a bonobo, is an example of ‘Childman’, or more specifically, ‘Early Happy, Innocent Childman’.