The Old Kingdom in Time and Space

Abstract

Call me Ishmael. Well, you can call me anything, really, just don’t call me a monkey; my opinion of your general knowledge and level of education will be greatly reduced if you do. Fm a hominid primate and proud of it. Monkeys have tails and questionable habits and are only very distantly related to me because their evolutionary line launched off on its own about 40 million years ago. But then, thanks to TV and printed media, we all know about that. Chances are that we’ve seen or read about Jane Goodall and her chimpanzees, about the plight of mountain gorillas in the interminable civil wars in Africa, and about the sad predicament of orangutans in the dwindling forests of Sumatra and Borneo. We know about Lucy, the 3-million-year-old fossil from Ethiopia, and, indeed, most people probably have quite a sophisticated understanding of animal relationships and evolution. It’s likely that this is centered on relationships to and evolution of the human animal. However, there are other bits of general knowledge that are equally impressive.