Friday, December 5, 2008

I can't be the first to notice that we're only the odd primate out in terms of height.

The baby primates all look the same.
Not 100% identical, but I would not think it was weird to have an orangutan live in a house and wear pampers and ride a tricycle and everything.
Because, oh my gosh, they look exactly like people, it is ridiculous.
Gorillas are scary because they are huge.
But what I am trying to point out is that in school they point at slides of bones and say, look these are the first humans, and it basically looks like a malformed skeleton and i don't care and I just feel bad for the bone owner for dying alone of starvation in a cave or whatever,* but the great apes are really interesting because they are alive, and can bite you or learn to talk. I think they possibly might be people, like children are people even though they can't talk or do anything.

*that is all I can think about when we had to talk about Neanderthals or homo erectus or whoever. Because I can sympathize-if you put me on a rock in the forest when I was a baby and I never went to preschool or rode a bicycle or had a watercolor set, that would be me dying because I can't kill enough food using only rocks, or because snow is cold or something. If only they had descendants in modern times we could show them, look, we made life easy! And you can just sit and play the harp! Look, you can fly around the world in 2 days! (I suppose) You don't have to ever be cold again, because this is California and here is Polartec. You have earned it!

Perhaps that is what humanity is doing now- reaping the benefits our antecedents dreamed of.

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