THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 31, 1995 TAG: 9507310036
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
How fascinating that two South African scientists suggest that man (and woman, as well, you can bet) was capable once of living in trees as well as on the ground.
Rummaging among discarded fossils at the University of Witwatersrand, Ronald Clarke found bones of a foot, 3.5 million years old, with a big toe that extended at a wide angle from the other toes.
With an ape-like leap, Clarke and Phillip Tobias concluded that the highly flexible toe enabled our ancestors to climb trees with ease. That just shows, which I had never expected, that scientists do, too, have imagination.
Had I found that sideways toe, I'd have dismissed it with the thought that whoever this guy was he would never have made a field goal kicker for the Washington Redskins.
Scientist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University scoffs at the idea that humans ever lived in trees. Basing such a theory on four foot bones was, he said, ``mechanically and developmentally naive.''
Oh, come now, Lovejoy! Is that any way for a scientist to respond?
I like the idea that once we were part-time tree dwellers, arboreal. (I like, too, the high-flying word arboreal, the sense of it and the rolling sound. If you can offer such a beauty, please do.)
The dream of living in trees, floating branch to branch, is as old as the human wish to fly. It explains, in part, the lure to the young of Tarzan of the Apes in Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels. We read those books to pieces, passing them around the neighborhood.
And then came the Tarzans of the funny papers and movies. Why, I saw the earliest among a dozen film Tarzans, pudgy Elmo Lincoln.
When Elmo landed on a branch, you looked for the tree to fall.
And there is children's impulse to climb trees and build tree houses.
The first thing the grandchildren do when they visit is vanish in the backyard wilderness and climb the deodora tree, high as a ship's main mast, festooned with wrist-thick vines on which they swing.
Could it be a case of individuals repeating the evolution of the human race? ``Ontogyny recapitulates phylogeny,'' they called it in school. (I ran that rule just now by Dr. Robert Smart, my former biology teacher at the University of Richmond.)
In my childhood, we spent hours in trees. My friend Henry was so apt at traveling in trees that his mother had a time getting him out of a big tree in her back yard.
When all else failed, she fried peach pies a golden brown, dusted them with powdered sugar, brought one outside and placed the plate 30 feet from the tree.
The fragrance lured Henry down. He ran for the pie just as his mother bolted out the back door. He had to cover 60 feet while she raced 20. Usually she grabbed his big toe as he swarmed up the trunk.
I think sometimes Henry climbed the tree near supper time just to get her to fry peach pies. by CNB