Thanks for the hyperlink, Greg. I bookmarked it, since there are a couple of people I know who should read it. It is hard to believe, but Darwin, for example, is widely believed by the Christian right to be some kind of Satanist, AND the root cause of the Holocaust.
Well, anyway, back to science. I saw a fascinating Nova presentation on PBS about Lucy, the 3.15 million-year-old woman whose remains were found recently. She died a natural death, and feel in an African river, which preserved her remains very well. While her skull was quite ape-like, with a sloping forehead, her knee joints were exactly like ours--she walked fully erect. The scientist who found her had theorized that as our ancestors evolved, we would find beings with big, rounded skulls who walked on all fours, who would then develop an upright walking skeleton at a later date.
However, the reverse turned out to be true in this species--a primitive head and modern posture. The scientist (sorry, I don't remember his name) was discussing how it must have happened the opposite way because it may have taken walking on two legs to have the self awareness, and response to stimuli in the environment, that causes brain growth as an evolutionary process.
Another part of the discussion concerned Lucy's size. She was about half as tall--a little over three feet--as a man who was found nearby, carbon dated to exactly the same time period. Sometimes this huge difference in size is indicative of species where the women live in harems. However, what is missing from that scenario is that apes which have harems also have really big canine teeth, for fighting the other males to keep them away from the harem. Lucy and her guy friend did not have big canine teeth, which, archaeologically speaking, suggests that they lived as life-long, monogamous couples.
It was a very interesting program, particularly the suggestion that they may have been very, very similar to us. |
