Today I returned from a wonderfully fun but entirely exhausting weekend in Talkeetna in which I camped by the river with a unrivaled view of McKinley. I was in town chiefly for a softball tournament, with plans for carousing in the down time. Well, my body hurts and both were total successes. We won the tournament, and you can find my picture on the trophy at the Fairview Inn as a member of the Mandingoes. I left more than just my image there as well, having spent hours dancing and celebrating the victory with tourists and revelers alike.
I’m sitting on my shabby blue love seat in front of the television right now. It’s where I’ve been since I rolled back into Anchorage and up my driveway. The bruises, cuts and dehydration that I sport at the moment happily made it uncomfortable to descend the five stairs to my current throne in front of the 50-incher.
GCI has pumped nothing but channel 58 into my house for the last four hours or so, that is until now. AMC is showing Hamburger Hill, the mesmerisingly depressing Vietnam War flick w/ a young Don Cheadle. Anyway….I watched a two hour special called “The Link” that featured a recently studied primate skeleton that has proven to be an ancestor of ours.
The skeleton was studied by a crack team of expert paleontologists. Of the six, one was female. She was selected for her knowledge, her reputation, and nothing else. Dr. Holly Smith of the University of Michigan was brought in and tasked with analyzing the 47 million-year-old Ida’s teeth and compare the 95-percent complete skeleton with that of the modern lemur, which is found exclusively in Madagascar and exists as an ancient cousin to our ancestral apes.
It was a pretty interesting show, and the team was able to prove that Ida — who is nearly 20 times older than Lucy — is in fact a ancestor of our species, modern homo-sapiens. The clincher was a bone, the talus bone, that they identified in the ankle of, well, great aunt Ida. Smith played a huge role in discovering the conclusion reached, and received a very comparable amount of airtime in the show, with no focus on the fact she’s a woman.
I suspect this type of attitude is found nearly exclusively in academic-type settings like this History Channel special, unlike Bridget’s Sexiest Beaches or some of the other trash that litters my selection.
Evolution is so thoroughly astounding when you try to drink it all in. Both scary and comforting at the same time, I find that I never tire of the subject. I have serious difficulty believing that many people refuse to recognize its legitimacy. Maybe as more discoveries pile on top of this one, minds will change.
