CREATING A CREATURE
Now it’s my turn to create, but I’m not going to be as flamboyant as Bantexkaa. For one thing, my computer gaming skills, at least compared with those of my eight-year-old son, are stuck in the equivalent of the Middle Paleolithic period. Second, I’m too much of goal-oriented Type A personality. I’m going to attempt to build a basic human-like creature—or rather, to duplicate one that actually once existed on our planet. But I’m not aiming too high—no fully developed, versatile, ready-to-dominate clone of Cro-Magnon man for me. Instead, I’m aiming relatively low. I’m going to try to build a member of Australopithecus, the genus that’s widely interpreted as being ancestral to our genus, Homo. I thought about picking Australopithecus anamensis, the oldest member, which roamed in east Africa about four million years ago. Unfortunately, all that remains of his kind are jaws and teeth, a shinbone, a skeletal toe and a few other fragments that don’t give me enough to reassemble him. Instead, I’ll opt for Australopithecus afarensis, which came along about a million years later. One example of Australopithecus afarensis: Lucy, a celebrity among hominids, whose nearly complete skeleton was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974.
Australopithecus afarensis was around three-and-a-half to five feet tall and in the artist’s depiction that I find on the Web, it walked upright with a slight slouch, a little like a teenage slacker. Correspondingly, I give my creature a modest sized, gently rounded spinal column. I attach arms that are nearly as long as his legs, since the ratio of afarensis’s humerus to its femur was 95 percent, virtually the same as a modern chimpanzee. (The ratio in a modern human is around 70 percent.) The feet are another important detail. Australopithecus afarensis had adducted big toes aligned with the other toes like ours. Those weren’t as good as apelike opposable big toes for climbing trees, but were much better for bipedal walking. I chose the most human-like option available. Ditto for the hands, though in real life, Australopithecus afarensis’s hands were more primitive than ours. As Encyclopedia Britannica notes, it was capable of gripping sticks and stones firmly for throwing and pounding, but lacked a fully developed human power grip that would allow objects to be held between the partly-flexed fingers and the palm, with counter-pressure applied by the thumb. Finally, I pick a head that has a modest-sized mouth and teeth, since afarensis’ teeth were smaller than modern apes and closer in size and development to those of modern humans. There isn’t a lot of room for a human-sized brain, but that’s okay; afarensis had one the size of a chimpanzee, providing evidence that the development of bipedalism may have preceded brain expansion.
^M
