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
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Family
Paleontology
Wildlife
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