A
ANT ‘The brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world,’ wrote Darwin, ‘perhaps more so than the brain of man.’
And yet ants are only intelligent in a colony. ‘Nobody has ever been able to teach an individual ant anything.’1 A lone ant will make a random decision at a Y junction every single time even if the eats and treats are always in the same place. If the brain of an ant is an atom, then it needs the field-effect of other brains for its atomic charge.
A million years ago in the Late Pleistocene, the population of early humans was dwindling. We’d dwindled down to a couple of tribes, or possibly down to one single solitary pregnant individual Australopithecus Lucy. This is the Bottleneck Theory, which rests on the fact that everyone alive on earth today shares DNA with Lucy. What we know is that she left Africa, and then in some remote corner of Europe, Lucy’s sons and daughters, I’m afraid to say, copulated with each other and produced offspring. Their offspring also copulated with each other. But then their offspring moved out of Norfolk, spread out and scattered over continents, flourishing spectacularly as they became more diverse.
Indeed in 2013, the oldest human footprints ever found outside of Africa were discovered in Happisburgh, Norfolk, but there is a mystery here. The 800,000 year old Happisburgh footprints have baffled paleoanthropologists because they are too ordered to have been produced by beachcombing or samphire picking, yet not quite linear enough to be walking in a straight line either.
Me and a team of paleoanthropologists from Stanford University mapped the footprints using photogrammetry, ran the pattern through a supercomputer database and made an astounding discovery. The Happisburgh footsteps exactly match only one other known pattern of human footsteps:
Brian Goodwin, How The Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity, Phoenix (1997). |