8/4/09 08:37 pm - Pterodactylus kochi
X-posted to http://paulcarneyillustrationz.blogspot.c
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Genius children's author and Goddess Katie McAllaster Weaver has just been interviewed on radio!!!! Catch her words here 




Briefly enamoured by what a couple of my classmates were able to do with Flash and After Effects, I was toying with the idea of a comedy animation based on hominid evolution. On reflection, I suspect that if I did attempt such a thing, then neither it nor my main project would ever come anywhere close to being finished. However, I'm pleased with these characters and suspect that some of them will rise again in other contexts.
Particularly the Paranthropus boisei character. Now, there's a subject very close to my heart. This is SUCH a cool species, with molars four times as large as a modern human's and a crested skull for improved jaw-muscle attachment, suggesting an immensely powerful chewing ability, but very small canines implying a much more gentle social life than chimps or even gorillas. When first discovered by Mary Leakey (and originally named Zinjanthropus) this species was found in association with the oldest known stone tools and, naturally, assumed to be the first primate not only to use implements but actually to make them by adapting and improving them.
Later research made it clear that Paranthropus was not a direct ancestor of modern humans but something of an offshoot from the family tree. So it was promptly decided that the species couldn't possibly have been clever enough to make tools after all, and that the Olduwan toolkit must have belonged to our nearer relative, Homo habilis. Arguments in support of this included the fact that P. boisei clearly had adaptations to a strict vegetarian diet and would have been too much of a specialist to display any kind of experimental or inventive behaviour. This prejudiced thinking is alive and well, as witnessed in Lord Winston's appalling TV series Walking with Cavemen, which sticks close to the brief of the rest of the BBC's Walking with... franchise in mixing scientific fact with wild conjecture
But O ye of little faith! Current thinking by serious anthropologists is that P. boisei may well have been the first toolmaker after all. It's the only species to have been found in close proximity to those tools, and the latest fossil finds show that its hands were more highly developed and more dextrous than anyone would have expected; certainly more than mere climbing and grasping would seem to necessitate. As Henry Gee pointed out, there is nothing but our own anthrocentric prejudice to suggest anything other than the obvious conclusion; that Paranthropus really WAS a toolmaker, and that he was doing it even before our own ancestors caught on.
It's nice that in the Horniman Museum, some of these primitive flint blades are exhibited alongside the replica Paranthropus skull as "associated tools". The Horniman is a wonderful time-capsule, full of badly stuffed animals and out-of-date labels which will never be changed. (A rather bedraggled juvenile rook, for instance, will forever go inder the name of Trypanocorax). In the case of those tools, it's so lovely to see how the information has been wrong for so long that things have come full circle, and this is one Horniman exhibit that is once more in line with the latest scientific theories.



