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Aunt Selam
Image yoinked from PZ. I assume he got it from behind the pay wall at Nature.
It might be the most beautiful face I’ve looked at in days. And I see a lot of beautiful faces in the course of a day.
This is the skull of a three-year-old girl, of the species Australopithecus afarensis. She died 3.3 million years ago. The Nature story refers to her as the “oldest known toddler.”
What delicacy, what sweetness I see in this face. I wonder at the contours of her lips, her cheekbones, her eyelids. I wonder where the long hair faded into shorter muzzle hair.
She died when she was Sophie’s age. A little older. What would a three-year-old Australopithecus have learned about the Pleistocene African world? Fear of snakes and lions and hyenas, probably. Fear of older troop members, perhaps. Did she play? Did she have friends?
She was my aunt, more or less, and yours too. The feeling swept over me when I saw the photo: recognition. And then an odd reverence.
She is a transitional fossil, by the way. The Nature article has the details, but her scapula is intermediate between humans and the other African great apes.
The creationists will deny this, claim the Link is still Missing. After looking at this photo for a time today, I find I pity them. They cannot feel the sublime and terrifying sense of heritage you and I share with this little girl. They cannot see the family resemblance, cannot look into those three-million-years-vacant eyes and know that they are kin to the chimps and gorillas, and thus kin to the lemurs, to the snakes and frogs and sharks. What a lonely, pallid life those ideologues must lead, with only a book of stories to fill in for the whole living world.
And I find I also pity Aunt Selam. Only three years old. Regard for children is far from a universal thing among humans: parents have reacted to the deaths of young children in many ways throughout history, not all of them involving weeping. But from what I know of our closest kin, I suspect these scientists may well have found the earliest known evidence of an elder’s searing grief.
Again, in this, we are kin to all. We are who and what we are because of those deaths. Natural selection works one tragedy at a time. The creationists find awe in one long-ago life sacrificed so that they might live. I owe my life, my identity to the sacrifices of billions, nay trillions of my ancestors. Hardly a source of cold, dispassionate fetishized rationality, that notion. We know so little of Aunt Selam’s life, but it’s already as compelling as anything on the Sunday radio, far more remote and far more believable.
Let us give thanks.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur,
How the living things that are descend from things that were.
The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies,
These tiny, humble, wordless things—-how shall they tell us lies?
We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring.
The truth has left its fingerprints on every living thing.
Remember, should you have to choose between them in the strife,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote life.
—Catherine Faber
By: By John M. Burt on 2006 09 21
I share your wonderment in looking at this face. So often the creationists say, “If we’re not created by God, then how do we find meaning in human life?” (or words to that effect). This refutes them, but they refuse to see.
By: By Charles on 2006 09 21
I agree wholeheartedly Chris. We are all connected to the universe, all part of the whole. Humans are not seperate or above nature. We have no right to control it or harness it, or use it all up.
This is my main beef with the religous teachings of the Aberhamic traditions (Christian, Muslim and Jewish)
By claiming we are above and seperate from nature, and that our goal is to get to heaven, humanity becomes destructive, like a horde of locusts, and a plague to The Earth.
I am oft critisized and ridiculed for my “paganish” ways, but finding the divine in nature, sure makes sense to me.
By: By Kelley Bell on 2006 09 21
“Natural selection works one tragedy at a time”
Yeah. Life is perpetually pregnant with loss and grief. And so much beauty.
And yes John, Charles and Kelley. Every breath, every wingbeat, every footstep refutes them. All they have is their fear. That is sad.
By: By Rob G on 2006 09 21
How beautifully you’ve voiced my feelings about our ancient predecessors! I identify with your reverence for them and for all living creatures.
By: By marja-leena on 2006 09 22
Or a lost little girl, her parents wailing for her for wandering off, and never finding her. Her bones speaking now for her, finally found.
By: By zhoen on 2006 09 22
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