March of Progress

The March of Progress,[1][2][3] originally titled The Road to Homo Sapiens, is an illustration that presents 25 million years of human evolution.

The illustration is part of a section of text and images commissioned by Time-Life Books for the Early Man volume (1965) of the Life Nature Library, by F. Clark Howell.

Beginning at right and progressing across four more pages are milestones of primate and human evolution as scientists know them today, pieced together from the fragmentary fossil evidence.

Contrary to appearances and some complaints, the original 1965 text of "The Road to Homo Sapiens" reveals an understanding of the fact that a linear presentation of a sequence of primate species, all in the direct line of human ancestors, would not be a correct interpretation.

[3] With regard to the way the illustration has been interpreted, the anthropologist and author of the section, F. Clark Howell, remarked:[6] The artist didn't intend to reduce the evolution of man to a linear sequence, but it was read that way by viewers. ...

In a chapter, "The Iconography of an Expectation", he asserted that[7] The march of progress is the canonical representation of evolution – the one picture immediately grasped and viscerally understood by all. ...

[11] The December 2005 issue of The Economist depicts hominids progressing up a flight of stairs to transform into a woman in a black dress holding a glass of champagne to illustrate "The Story of Man".

[14] Thomas Henry Huxley's frontispiece to his 1863 book Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature was intended simply to compare the skeletons of apes and humans, but its unintentional left-to-right progressionist sequence has according to the historian Jennifer Tucker "become an iconic and instantly recognizable visual shorthand for evolution".