This may have slipped under the media radar a little bit, not bearing quite the urgency of an impending attack on Iraq or Martha Stewart's hot water, but from the cover of the August National Geographic an ape is staring out at me, with hauntingly human eyes. The cover's title is: "THE FIRST PIONEER? A new find shakes the human family tree." This is exciting news, especially if you think the tree exists, and it's important, especially if you don't. After all, you want to know to whom you're related, don't you? The tree image is mildly bothersome, suggesting as it does a single organism, but the truly irksome part for many belongs to the tree's adjectives - "human family." Most of us think we know what our family members look like, and if you had one who looks like the one looking at me, you'd conceal him in a walled-off dungeon in the lower parts of your castle home, as is done in horror movies. The idea of the human family sitting at the top of a tree, on the highest branch, from which the only escape is down, is, for some, difficult to swallow and, for others, unacceptable and insulting.

What makes the ape on the cover (really fine eyes, you can see the blood vessels in the whites; the artist is to be congratulated) problematic for scientists, however, is of an entirely different nature. They take the tree's existence for granted. No, what bothers them is that this fellow should not have been found where he was, beneath the medieval town of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia (a part of the former Soviet Union) between the Black and Caspian Seas, in sediment estimated to be 1.7 to 1.8 million years old. Based on the well-preserved skull and an upper arm bone (that's all they found of this individual), scientists think our new creature resembled one of its predecessors, Homo Habilis, a long-armed, short-legged hominid whose physique would be more suited to a life in the trees than to an on-foot safari northward. You see, it's the "out of Africa" thesis that our new ape threatens, or at least complicates. Prior to this find, it was thought that Homo Erectus was the first to leave our home continent. He was built for it, with a skeleton virtually identical to our own but with only three quarters of our brain size. Mr. Dmanisi's brain was less than half the size of a modern human's. So what was he doing in Russia? Well, maybe, our scientists speculate, Erectus evolved from Dmanisi stock somewhere in Asia, "and then moved back to Africa. Maybe there were multiple migrations back and forth." After all, Asian Erectus did not have handaxes (which means we haven't found any yet) while African E. did. And what about Mr. Dmanisi's lack of brainpower? "There's no reason to downgrade these earyly Georgians on the IQ scale," says one scientist. "They took a long hike and they made it," as though being well-traveled also made one smart. He speculates that what's important is the ratio of grey matter to everything else. This sounds reasonable on the face of it, for we know that elephants and whales have larger brains than our own, but in primates we have found that size really does matter. And in more ways than one. Other remains were found with Mr. (or Miss) Dmanisi, some petite, some gargantuan. Hmm. But why not? ask the scientists. Shaquille O'Neal and Danny DeVito are members of the same species, are they not? Now there's an insight. What if, ask the scientists, who have given "new species names to every Homo find with significant differences," we "have made the human family tree more complicated than it really is?" Is all this coming clear yet? The complexity of their reasoning makes the head swim. How about this for a hypothesis? What if a tribe of continent-wandering Homo Erecti took a bunch of Dmanisis along with them as prisoners, and then, upon arrival in Mother Russia, ate them? I don't wish to make Mr. Erectus more barbaric than he really was, but I think the odds are in my favor. You see, in the past each set of unearthed remains seemed to make the picture clearer, especially once they set those artists to work, but with Mr. Dmanisi it all gets fuzzy again. One scientist grumbled, "They ought to put him back in the ground." Actually, Mr. Professor, I think you ought to keep digging. After all, there's so much dirt out there and you've hardly scratched the surface. Eventually so many calcified remains might emerge that you won't be able to figure out where anybody came from. Or, dread thought, what if all the arrows start pointing to a valley somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers? A not necessarily desirable result, by the way, for it would be for these scientists the psychological equivalent of the stock market crash, with paleoanthropologists throwing themselves from the windows of tall buildings.

Perhaps you thought it was our goal to get at the truth of the matter. Not at all. The Dmanisi find simply reminded me of something that happened to my daughter when she was ten years old, in the fifth grade. We had made arrangements with a family down the street to look after her for a couple of hours after school until I got home from work. This was a family of fundamentalist persuasion, though to what church they belonged I never knew. They were vague about it. The husband hung drywall for a living and the wife stayed home where she schooled her three kids in readin', writin', 'rithmetic, and scripture. All the math lessons were somehow structured around scripture passages. I admired the ingenuity of it but was not sure of its wisdom. But we were grateful to this family for being there to watch over our kid after her short walk from public school. They were the only family in the neighborhood with a mother who stayed at home. I arrived one day to pick Elizabeth up and found her sitting on their couch looking shell-shocked.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"Oh!" exclaimed the wife. "They were teaching her evolution today."
I could imagine them asking her each day, "What'd you learn in school today?" - a not so innocent question if you're always on the lookout for a secular heresy. They'd finally found one.
"Well," Elizabeth weakly protested, "they didn't actually teach it, just sort of..."
"I've been trying to help her out," said the mother. "I hope we didn't overwhelm her."
Overwhelmed was exactly how she appeared. The mother and her kids had had two hours to browbeat her. The husband, with whom every casual conversation somehow turned to a recent finding concerning the inaccuracy of radio-carbon dating, was absent. I realized then, watching my princess, that you can beat a kid over the head with either the Bible or The Origin of Species and still leave him feeling bludgeoned. I suggested that, in the future, the controversial topics be left to me. I could handle it.
As we walked home I asked, "Are you ok?" "Yeah," she said. Then, "Is the earth really only six thousand years old, 'cause they said in school..."
"What difference does it make?" I asked. "God's in charge. You're not here by accident. That's all that matters."
"I know, but.." and now I really wasn't so sure I could handle it. How do you boil this down for a ten year old? She was bright, but not ready for a discourse on the mathematical improbability of even a single functional protein forming by chance, on the implications of gaps in the fossil record, or on the more recent insights offered by irreducible complexity and intelligent design. Nor was I convinced that I was ready either. I asked her if we could take this up tomorrow, when my answers would be better formed. She said yes, but could tell I was putting her off. Then it hit me. A kid doesn't want a discourse. A kid wants a story. There's a reason why Kipling's Just So Stories are read by children generation after generation while hardly anyone, even of suitable age, ever reads the Origin of Species. If the story of life is really a story, then somebody had to tell it. Why not me?

The Truth of Me

When still the earth was very young
And life had barely formed,
I knew God had a plan for me
The day that I was born.

There were many others like me
And we looked too much the same -
You all know Mr. Amoeba and
Paramecium both by name -

But before I knew just who I was
(I dined on one-celled plants)
I grew a few more cells myself
And joined the army ants.

But an ant's life is a lousy lot,
You're stepped on by the dogs,
And if you go out after dark
You're eaten by the frogs.

You're forced to live beneath the ground
And march in single file,
There's too much heavy lifting and -
Oh! to be a reptile.

But before I was a reptile
(Which was my fondest wish)
Never having learned to swim
I first became a fish.

I think I was a minnow for
About a million years,
When once again my DNA
Switched genetic gears.

A big fish now, I bade farewell
To all my minnow brothers;
Some wisely swam away- the rest?
I'm afraid I ate the others.

For several eons more I swam,
Drank water to the dregs,
Wore out my fine pectoral fins
And grew a pair of legs.

I dragged myself up on the shore
To take a look around,
Liked the possibilities
And made for higher ground.

I looked back once to gaze upon
That green and murky lake,
When suddenly my legs were gone
And now I was a snake.

A snake's life is a lousy lot,
You're lower than the plants;
You're forced to live beneath the ground
And mingle with the ants;

You never see the light of day,
The sun is much too hot;
At night you pray you fall not prey
To owl or ocelot.

Though there be but one of me
To crawl in single file,
I rue the day when I did say,
"Lord! to be a reptile."

Oh, to have my legs again
(That is my fondest wish),
Or even fine pectoral fins
When still I was a fish.

God's curse is placed upon me
And all reptilian eggs,
God's mercy shown upon me
When He gave me back my legs.

His wisdom now enlarged upon
My slovenly, slithering form -
According to the plan He laid
The day that I was born -

By opening another
Evolutionary door
(For gazing skyward now I saw
The pterdactyl soar),
And He raised my craven belly
From off the forest floor,
From out of the mud He warmed my blood,
Up He raised (to shouts of praise)
The terrible dinosaur.

What happened next is unresolved
So take you no man's word:
Some say I died the endless death,
Some say I became a bird.

What really happened I'll never tell
For I truly can't remember;
If you look on the cosmic calendar
It was sometime last November.

I only know my relatives
Dispersed this way and that;
One turned into a St. Bernard,
Another became a cat.

One turned into a polar bear
(To me it's all the same),
Though the one who became a kangaroo
Disgraced the family name.

One turned into a humpback whale
Who swims that murky sea
To which, from land, I waved goodbye
When I was not yet me.

Another grew a prehensile tail
And swings from limb to limb;
Though loathing to confess it I'm
Afraid I'm related to him.

But God gave me, unlike him,
A slightly larger skull,
Though by standards of the future
I was relatively dull.

Who am I? I'll give a clue:
My neck is thick at the nape;
I beat my breast - that's right, you've guessed -
I turned into an ape.

Though not yet quite apposable
I possessed a clever thumb
And clever brain (which yet remained)
Comparatively dumb.

And yet, you see, the three of me
Who climbed down from the trees -
Gorillas, orange orangutans
And silly chimpanzees -

Grew tired of the jungle life -
(Bananas are a bore;
I daily dined on haute cuisine
While still a dinosaur) -

So we moved out in the open,
Two of us at least -
Orangutan, he stayed behind
And stayed a stupid beast -

But I (perhaps the chimpanz-eye?)
Lost my heavy brow
And found a slightly larger brain
Yet never wondered how.

Then I underwent a change
That noone could expect:
God juxtaposed my skeleton
And made me stand erect.

An improvement for, when on all fours,
You're often looking down,
And who can throw a football
With his knuckles on the ground?

Neither can you separate
The bottle from its cork,
And you really haven't made it
Till you've learned to use a fork.

So God then crowned His wondrous work
Of blessed transformation
By granting me capacity
For ratiocination.

An improvement for, without a brain,
You're still the missing link;
You'll never build a steepled church
Until you've learned to think.

More than that, God's love reached forth
To make of me a whole;
He gently breathed the breath of life -
I am a living soul.

And now that I'm a man
Looking back upon it all,
I'm baffled by the things I was
While still an animal.

I was graceful as a fish
But lacked a human heart,
Cunning as a reptile
But not superlatively smart,

Charming as a monkey, and,
When at last I tried,
Confessed that walking upright
Made me rather dignified.

I don't recall ever having
Been a black baboon,
And if I'm never one of those
It'll never be too soon.

And if all this hasn't sounded
Scientifically precise,
That's because among my kin
There were no laboratory mice.

To tell the truth I can't be sure
That any of it's true;
I only know what I've been told
And now I'm telling you.

I've also heard that other tale,
That Eve's my only mother,
(Lovely gal, though fond of fruit)
And you and I are brothers,

That tale of the universe
Before the earth began,
When even then He knew my name
And called me as a man,

That story of the universe
When earth was in its morn;
To know our God, this was His plan,
For this a man was born.

---

There, that should distract your ten year old. For a while. When he, or she, gets to high school biology, you'd better be able to come up with something.