Tracks in eastern African indicate that Homo Erectus prevailed over Paranthropus boisei because its “modern gait and longer strides” helped it “expand its range significantly and increase the diversity of its diet, ultimately leading it to become more cosmopolitan.”
“The more territory you have, the more stuff you can munch on, and the more stuff you can munch on, the greater input of energy into the system, which can fuel a growing brain,” according to a Dartmouth College paleoanthropologist.
The Wall Street Journal
I was walking along with my friends Ug and Nutz, guys I’ve been hanging with for like a million years, when Ug started . . . drifting off.
“Aren’t you coming with us?” I asked.
“Let him go,” Ug said. “We don’t have to always be together.”
“Ug–where are you going?”
He had that blank look on his face that he gets sometimes. He’s not the brightest star in the heavens, if you get what I mean, so I feel a special obligation to keep him on the straight and narrow path.
“Me no go your way,” Nutz said. I say “said” but it was more of a grunt.
“Why not?”
Nutz looked at me and said “Me go east”
“I’d actually prefer if he didn’t come with us,” Ug said. “He’s hurting our chances of mating, the way he’s always drooling.”
That’s Ug for you. Always looking out for #1–which is this case, and always, is him.
“C’mon, Nutz isn’t as highly developed as us,” I said, remonstrating with Nutz way before the remonstrator had been invented.
“Fewer males means more females for us,” Ug said, picking a louse out of his hair. That’s how far male grooming had developed.
“Ug,” I said, trying to change his mind. “If you come with us to the north, there’ll be lots of snacks.”
“Snacks?” he said, with that RCA Victor pooch look of puzzlement on his face.
“Crunchy stuff, like this,” I said, taking a handful of pine nuts in my mouth. “Umm–good,” I said, to show him what he’d be missing out on.
“Ug no go north–too cold.”
Ug was slowing us down. He was better at climbing trees than hiking long distances. His big toes curved away, so he could grab limbs with his feet. Me and Nutz, we had adopted a more casual upright posture that allowed us to walk longer distances through upscale, sophisticated shopping districts, where females like to congregate. We didn’t agree on much, but we both had a burning desire to pass our genetic materials down to descendants by getting it on with as many bodacious babes as possible.
Nutz exhaled loudly, a sign that he was getting tired of my altruistic impulses. “Ug is never going to be cosmopolitan,” he said, and I glimpsed–far off in the future–a time when instead of just male and female hominids, there’d be something called . . . metrosexuals.
“Well, how am I going to get him to stop climbing trees and evolve, like you and me?”
“You’ve appealed to him on the basis of food and sex–I don’t think there’s anything left for a knuckle-dragger like him.”
In his defense, I’m not a fan of heading north into the cold, either.