Excelsior

Although some would deny that coexistence is writ is the stars, it will shortly become dogms in the Soviet Constitution. Similarly, to confound disbelievers in the law of progress, American auto makers have decided to install safety belts in their '62 models. A world full of earnest men coexisting dogmatically and all wearing safety belts is perhaps a little too richly utopian for a generation taught to look at life gloomily--as if from the inside of someone's Better Mousetrap. Yet such a sunny world is emerging, and science has recently made a comforting discovery which ought to dispel completely any snivelling doubts that things are getting better.

The new find is the skull of an 11-year-old child believed to be the oldest member of the human race distinguishable from mud. The child is thought to be well over 600,000 years old, which means that he is, in plain fact, older than Nutcracker Man. Now the significance of the child is this: the distance between him and Nutcracker Man (a matter of brain capacity and degree of specialization, not to mention N.M.'s astounding molars) is clinching empirical proof that the human species has advanced steadily and with a fair degree of haste from an 11-year-old hominid to better and newer models with--dare we say it--safety belts.

Nutcracker Man relates to his predecessor as, say, Marlboro Man relates to Viceroy Man. The lines of development are clear: Marlboro Man was a rough, inarticulate and profoundly simple specimen, setting the tone for the advertising in the era known as the Eisenhower Fifties. Viceroy Man is suave, and cultivated, and knows how to talk and drink with Harvard professors be meets in Washington. He is the figure of the Kennedy Sixties.

The 11-year-old hominid and his nutcracking progeny, the two cigarette buffs--these are the rungs on the ladder whose inevitable and is whatever lies beyond safety belts.