THE LAST HUMANS(1933)

SOURCES: "Time's Mausoleum" (Amazing Stories, December 1933)

DESCRIPTION: “At a later period of a few hundred thousand years, Professor Jameson found marked changes in humanity. Man had reached an advanced stage of evolution, where one of his ancestors of five million years ago would have disowned him as an incredible monstrosity. His legs were jointed to move in either of two given directions. Four arms terminated in eight digits. The body was comparatively small. This...was due to disappearance of the digestive tract. Science of that era...had supplanted the comparatively short existence of the gastric organs with a more practical means of existance. Man's radioactive blood was kept charged with energy from huge broadcasting units located over the Earth and on the spaceships in which he traveled. Oxygen was superfluous, too. A lifetime of ten thousand years was common. Man's head had become devoid of both mouth and nostrils. Like the appendix of man, the unused mouth had finally disappeared. Food no longer was a necessity, and articulate speech had long since yielded to mental telepathy, like that of the Zoromes. Instead of hair, there arose from the head fully two dozen antennae, serving a double purpose of picking up thought waves and the reception of the broadcasted energy for their bodies. Two black, lidless eyes peered intently from the face. Humanity had done away with sleep. The energy broadcasters kept the body charged constantly.” (“Time's Mausoleum” by Neil R. Jones)

NOTES: The last version of the human being, five million years from our time, is not a very attractive specimen without a mouth, nostrils and having two dozen antennae. He communicates by telepathy and receives nutrients from something like cell phone towers. The race eventually leaves the Solar System for far Sirius.

HISTORY: Jones tries to follow the logical changes of the human race. (I'm not sure why we should develop four arms and eight digits though.) This kind of extrapolation had been done earlier by Edmond Hamilton in "The Evolved Man" (Wonder Stories, April 1931) . Jones shows an interest in evolution as an idea throughout the series. He once uses the term "evolutionized" instead of "evolved" which shows how uncommon the terminology was in the 1930s.