chapter 57 *Wingspan*

i grinned and sauntered farther up the arena and followed tasha as she made her way in and out past groups of close students and sat down next to a larger crowd that consisted of a mix of boys and girls.

"inside voices and pay attention to the movie." Ms. pratt said over the opening credits. "there might be a quiz on it."

i ignore the group next to me and watch as the screen flickered from black to a golden yellow. Torch flames flickered and the pictured zoomed in sharper.

a caveman dressed in fur held a torch as the narrator addressed his viewers.

a mans middle aged voice boomed from the speakers like ping pong shooting off the walls of the gym. 

"where do we come from?" came the allocated speech.

good question, i thought, grinning.

not knowing why, i had the slightest uneasy feeling that someone was watching me.

i chalk it up to not feeling well and so that's why i was acting wacky and paranoid which made sense considering i'd been tense and jumpy lately.

keeping my eyes on the screen i watched as it changed from man to ape climbing up a tree.

then the image shifted to a scholarly man spruced up in oxford apparel that was studying a half a skull with intense scrutiny.

"for centuries the greatest question in the history of man had no scientific answer; then the first evidence of a human ancestor started a scientific revolution." The oration echoed past my ears as i strained to give my undivided attention.

caved men confronted a pit of fire with fear and unease. i would have too. "this is the story of the quest to find the origins of the human race...."

that intense prickly awareness made my head shoot up.

sitting down cool and composed i locked eyes with a smiling boy who waved at me.

laughing at myself, i wave back, feeling lightened and at ease. i wasn't imagining things.

Wesley saw me and like the nice guy he was, waved hello.

the thought that i had to find some place to take a seat was the reason i hadn't approached him earlier or else i would've taken the empty space behind him.

i kept my eye on the film after smirking at mason who'd saluted me and watch a history channel documentary about the evolution of our ancestors.

"it spanned a century and a half of obsessive searching and would make or break the careers of some of the great scientists in the field. for the lucky few chance discoveries opened a window on the hidden world of our ancestors. from the tiniest fragments of the past the full story was slowly pieced together. spanning 300,000 generations over three million years. it is the story of our progress from the Ape to Man. the search for the origins of humanity is the story of bones and the tales they tell..."

the year was august 1856.....workmen were digging for limestone that lay under rock and soil in a cave that lies in what is now the neandervalley in germany. apparently limestone was a vital ingredient in the local chemical industry.

the men who were paid a few cents a day to remove a surface of the layer stopped when a spade hit something that sounded like it wasn't a rock.

Huh. the shape looked like top of a skull.

thinking it might be a murder victim the two unskilled laborers stopped work to show the foreman what they'd unearthed.

"found something? whats this then?" it was interesting but he'd seen that kind of thing before and was happy to send it with all the other bits of bone they'd found to be smashed up with the rocks.

intrigued, i watched as something made the foreman change his mind and ordered to give it to a local school teacher. apparently what the teacher had found was that the skull was seeing the light of day for the first time in more 40,000.

as it turned out the original owner of the skull was Neanderthal Man.

Now forty thousand years later a school teacher Victorian scientist Johann fuhlrodt got the chance to see the skull for the first time. a keen amateur geologist and former anatomy student, instinctively he knew the skull was something extraordinary.

"it looked fossilized, which would make it thousands of years old, and it was clearly not an animal. neither was it from a normal human being." said the male narrator.

From Europe to the Middle East over three-hundred Neanderthal remains were found; they all told the same story of a short and powerful physique perfectly evolved for the world they lived in.

what they had learned from the skeletons was that they were very robust, but they also were very strong and they had a huge brain.

neanderthal delved some sophisticated stone technology.

like the modern weaponry of today their weapons were their tool of survival needed to be maintained. if a spear failed at a critical moment they would fail.

What really spoke to me was the fact that the need to survive was past down from generation to generation, father to son, just as these Neanderthal ancestors had to kill in order to survive so did thousands of Americans year round especially during hunting season. 

it made me wonder if survival of the fittest wasnt just a saying. how could we initiate a peace treaty between nations when being able to kill man went hand in hand to being number one on the food chain. 

i looked over at wesley and tried to interpret the dire expression on his face. he was staring intently at me as my eyes met his brown ones. the simple contact made me feel exposed somehow. like he could read my mind somehow and instinclty know how vulnerable i was. 

that kind of intimacy always made me skittish. i didn't like how naked i felt as wesleys eyes bore into mine. freaky was one word for it. 

i was the first to look away and sever eye contact and didn't peek in his direction at all which was harder to do than i first thought.  

instead i studied the movie more thoroughly than anyone ought to. i tired not to make it look as if i were purposefully ignoring wesley but i don't think it worked. and if wesley tried gaining my attention i wouldn't know. 

cavemen were climbing up a mountain. from what the narrator suggested they had a highly evolved sense of smell that would allow them to recognize the scent of reed deer droppings. Eew. 

i didnt feel eyes on me anymore and i wanted to see if wesley was still their but my eyes didnt leave the screen when the cavemen started to rub animal droppings all over them.

their attempt to disguise their approach worked. they caught up with the deer and killed it.

as it went, they had to range further in recent months to find a kill because red deer numbers had fallen rapidly and they had no idea why. what they didnt know was that they had competition that would one day drive them to extinction.....

it made me think about the fragile foundation of the ghostly plane. each day that went by i could instinctively feel it work very hard and stretch to its outstanding limit. in its history it was the in-between, the place where newly departed ghosts went before they entered heaven or hell. 

that plane in between planes that tested original sin was packed with inhabitants. why do you think today you hear stories of hauntings? its because the plane that originally held these dead people is thinning. 

which makes it easy for them to slip past the cracks and cloak themselves on earth so that they could spread fear. 

ghosts had the same attributes and opinions before death so like people ghosts could be mean or pleasant. 

"i think the idea of a missing link came from a very simple view of evolution and that's not surprising. it was simple because these ideas were in their infancy. but people had idea of fixed times there were humans and there were apes. an evolutionary transition between these two times would somehow combine the features of both times. so people were looking for something that would be half a living human and half a living ape." said professor chris stringer.

the timeline moved to october 1889. the monsoon season was beginning. for good reason no on tried to negotiate the dense forest unless they had to. 

eugiene dubwa invested everything he had into finding the missing link. 

according to the documentary dubwa was the worst person to go into the field a; because he had no experience b; he didn't know how to each his crew and c; he didn't know how to take care of them. 

"theyre out in the field, its raining, its a complete shamble. he'd found caves which he'd hoped would produce the fossils he was looking for. they hadnt. his engineer had given up digging and all but a few of his convict laborers had gotten sick or run away." said the narrator. 

to make matters worse malaria had already claimed his first engineer and he was about to loose patience with the second. 

"what are you doing?" dubwa asked

"cleaning up." simply said the engineer 

"you're paid to find things, what have you found?" 

"plenty, its over there." the engineer pointed out. he hadn't been paid in over a month but this meant nothing to dubwa. 

poor euguene he desperately wanted to find something, wants to make a name for himself but he finds nothing. so after spending months in the jungle dubwa had just a few animal fossils to show for the time and money he'd spent. 

"this is it this is all of it?" dubwa had many trials and tribulations and someone not as determined or as obsesed would have given up and gotten home. but not him. 

"we've looked." said the engineer. 

"well look again! there are plenty men who would give their right arm for a job like this. well find one then! what? you heard me. find one." dubwa realized his attempt to find the missing link had failed and he fired his engineer. they leave sumatra and he goes elsewhere. 

and so the timetable moved forward two years later. 

dubwa started the search again this time in java. finally his luck had started to take a turn for the better. dubwa had a new dig site with a bigger team overseen by the dutch army.

one day in oct 1891 they found a fossilized skull just like neanderthal 40 years earlier. 

it may have been only a skull cap but like neanderthal it sent its discovery into a frenzy of speculation. 

this was not a normal ape. the brain cavity was clearly large yet obviously not a human skull. the only thing dubwa could compare it to was neanderthal. 

was it the missing link? the key dubwa believed was the size of the brain and he had a precise mathematical model to determine the missing link. 

its brain cavity should be precisely human and twice the size of a chimpanzee but when he calculated the brain cavity of this skull it was the wrong size. it was too big for the halfway point therefore too big to be the ape like creature he'd imagined. 

a complete fossilized leg bones shape suggested that its owner stood upright and walked on two legs like a man. dubwa couldn't change the evidence so he changed the model. 

he decided the missing link had to have a brain almost as large as our own. and he was so convinced by his meager evidence that he wrote to the duchoneal government announcing that he'd found the missing link and called it pithocanticuerecticus. 

one of the most successful dominant species ever to walk the earth, upright walking man.

standing at about six feet their bodies are similar to our own. their brain about two third the size of ours. homoerectus was on the verge of becoming human. 

the representation of the homoerectus popped up in diagram form. 

weight: 164 for the first time we had access to the concentrated protein of meat. yet there's no evidence to suggest that homoerectus was a true hunter. 

brain: 900cc 

habitual: rock shelter.  

homoerecuts was at a crossroads of evolution. 

when humans tamed fire it was a huge step forward remarkable event for people to face up to fire and they learned how to control it rather than running away from it which is a natural instinct. 

Colin Menter takes a stick and creates a line on the beach near the ocean. 

i watch as professor colin menter takes two skulls from his green backpack and puts both skulls on the line. both fossils sate back to the same age at 1.8 million years of age. "so what do you do when you have two fossils?" professor Menter asked. 

"you have to remove zinje from human line and place them in different lines. in the same valley within meters of each other you have them living side by side and that makes a whole paradigm shift of how we view human evolution and so this line is all of a sudden broken apart." 

suddenly what had been a single line of descent had been replaced by a series of lines that connected to form a gigantic family tree. in years between 1925 and 1965 hominand fossils were found and categorized in south africa and they could all be replaced right next to each other by accurate dating. 

while some species were evolutionary dead ends others appeared to be part of a line that lead to humans but a number of human like competitors marked the earth at the same time with several roots to humanity.

the only way to cut through the confusion was to go back further in time to the root of the human family tree. before we had a big brain, long before we used fire and language before we even made tools the creature everyone was looking for marked the very beginning of humanity.

the timetable focused in hadar ethiopia. it was nov. 30 1974 and an american lead team was searching for the oldest american ancestor on earth. 

it was possible to date rocks very accurately so it was possible to be more precise than ever before about where to dig. using new radiometric technologies they dated the volcanic layer to around 3 and a half million years old. 

team leader donald yohansen was a rising star in the world of anthropology. he knew darts ostrolopithicusafrocuscarnus lived over two million years ago. 

and leekes homohabilius at about one and three quarter million. but they were on separate ancestral lines. 

yohansen believed there was a common ancestor over three million years old the same age as the surrounding rocks.....

needing a break from essential paperwork a chore he was determined to finish yohan took a hike with tom grey as they headed away form the sight to explore a couple of isolated gulleys but as the day wore on they had little to show for there efforts. 

i watched as something caught yohansens eye. it was a shape in the dirt that seemed too regular to be stone. it was a fossilized arm bone and there as more parts of a small skull. 

one unbelievable question went through his mind: what if all the pieces fit together? could they be parts of a extremely primitive skeleton? 

if don yohanson was right he was looking at the most complete skeletal remains of our earliest ancestor yet discovered. 

professor leslie aiello, "what makes this individual an absolutely spectacular find is that shes still complete. for the first time we had more than the odd broken bone of one sentiment we have virtually an entire skeleton whats missing on one side is presented on the other side. its rare because these hominants didn't bury there dead and in normal circumstance if an individual died the scavengers would come and the bones would be dispersed the mere probability that something is fossilized is extremely small. but to actually go in and find such a beautiful fossil of a complete human ancestor is really a once in a lifetime occurrence."

the documentary ended sometime after and everyone filed out of the gymnasium. 

the rest of the day was slow and all i wanted to do was lay down and get some rest. i had lunch with mya and tasha but didnt say a word to rachel when she left early to meet up with those two boys she'd met earlier.

mya and Tasha had said their final goodbyes as we walked across the quad.

"see ya." i wave to them and head to my dormitory building.