This satire shows evolution in fastforward. If it interests you, consult some recent discussions of the topic of evolution in the popular press:

"Darwin revisited" in The Economist of 8-30-97, p.11. Go on to read a report on the Vienna International Ethological Conference in the same issue, pp. 59-61. Fascinating stuff on Lorenz, Tinbergen and their successors, on mice and men and fish and bees. They all had mainly sex on their minds.
The magazine has a Web Edition <www.economist.com>, you are asked to register in order to browse.

"Evolution" in  DISCOVER  of January '98.
Matt Cartwill's "Oppressed by Evolution" in Discover of March '98.

Science News of April 24, 1999 reports the discovery of fossils, 2.5 million yrs old, belonging to a new species in the human evolutionary family (p.262).
The same issue contains the interesting observation that ants "beat humans in developing agriculture by some 50 million years. Now ... it looks as if the same ants came in ahead on bacterial antibiotics by millions of years" (p.261). I'll restate here what I've written in another context  (Mother Courage): These investigations ... are most helpful in our context, once we abandon the common prejudice that "the crown of creation" cannot learn from "lower life forms."

And
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871)
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989) and The Blind Watchmaker (1985)
Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered (1992)
Verne Grant, The Evolutionary Process: A Critical Review of Evolutionary Theory (1985)
Peter J. Bowler, Life's Splendid Drama (1996)
Michael R. Rose, Darwin's Spectre: Evolutionary Biology in the Modern World (1998)
Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (first publ.in 1955)
(And three million more)

Note that five years of frantic adaptation allow the ape to reach the cultural level of an average European. But the change is purely intellectual and mental, there is no physiological change that we can detect. We are lead to assume that the ape already possesses a brain large and complex enough to absorb what it must in order to function at the level of a contemporary homo sapiens.
The implied question would seem to be: do we "need" the brain we have, or is its size excessive, superfluous, largely unused and therefore uneconomical? It is in this context that I read to you the piece "When antlers grew too large" from the March 6, '99 issue of Science News. The antlers "consumed" more than they "produced".
Here was the challenge: see if the technical data in the article can be worked into a short story, something like the reversal of our attempt as we tried to extract the technical, evolutionary data from Kafka's story.
If the ape needs a mere five years to leap across the two million years that it took the rest of us, what additional advantages did the slower process yield? Apparently appearance only. The arms got shorter, the fur disappeared, we look more naked now. Was it worth it? The ape does not think so. He has no desire to look or become human to begin with. Unfortunately it is the only way out of the tiger cage in which humans, the Hagenbeck crew, have placed him. Men have determined that apes belong in a cage. So the ape has to stop being an ape. Man, the crown of creation, the product of divine craftsmanship? Ridiculous. Any determined ape can do it.
How is the impossible accomplished? Don't panic. Become perfectly calm. Rationally examine your options. Reinvent yourself. Don't look back. Enlist help.

Subtopics:
Slave trade.
"Panoptikum." Reconstruction of African villages in major European cities, complete with "live savages." The travelling show of Wild Bill Hickock, American Indians among the performers, satisfied a similar curiosity among the "civilized".