THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 11, 1995 TAG: 9511110001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 53 lines
Two curious new portraits - the full-length variety - have been added the full-length variety - have been added this year to the gallery of our prehistoric ancestors. One, the oldest, was somewhat more curious, at least to me, than the other. Both were the results of finds in Africa.
Granted, the biggest scientific splash was the analysis of an incomplete shinbone of a creature weighing about 120 pounds and called Australopithicus anamensis. A number of A. anamensis fossils have come to light in Kenya over a period starting in 1965.
A team which included Meave Leakey, of the well-known Leakey digging dynasty, has concluded from the shinbone's structure that it belonged to an erect-walking human predecessor.
The significance of this report is that the upright posture appears to have developed much earlier in primate lineage than had been thought: about a half-million years earlier, or around 4 million years ago.
Going much further back, however - to a point 36 million years ago - was the announcement from Duke University's Elwyn Simons that some bones he and his colleagues found in Egypt three years ago were those of the earliest human/ape/monkey ancestor yet discovered.
This primeval species, dubbed Catopithecus, was right down there in the roots of the primate family tree, Simons claims.
And one of the most noteworthy traits of Catopithecus was its size. True enough, the very first mammals on Earth, investigators told us long ago, were tiny, shrewlike animals, scurrying timidly around the feet of the dinosaurs who dominated land-life in the Jurassic Period, more than 140 million years ago.
But in the case of Catopithecus, the scientists are talking about the origins of the particular line, much later, that produced humans.
But there it was. In the news account of the Simons study, this little ancestor of our very own was described as not much larger than those shrew things. The phrase for Catopithecus was ``squirrel-sized.''
It was on reading this bit that my thoughts took their curious twist:
In our modern epoch (Holocene, to be scientifically persnsickety), in neighborhoods overrun by fuzzy-tailed, tree-climbing rodents, I'm not the only one to have made this tongue-in-cheek forecast:
``Just wait. The squirrels are going to take over the Earth.''
Now it looks like one of them, or something eeriely similar, already did. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk.
by CNB