Taki Taki

High life | 29 November 2018

This makes Brexit take a back seat: hints of ancient life have appeared on Mars. Carbon building blocks and other signs of past microbes are thought to lie in Jezero, a 28-mile-wide crater just north of Mars’s equator. The crater was once filled with a lake that was 800ft deep. Just imagine the sailing that went on among upper-class Martians 3.5 billion years ago. It was warmer back then — up there, that is — and that lake, I am certain, was where the elite met to eat and swim. And sail.

We humans have been evolving for some time now, but not really. Only a few decades ago we were certain that the oldest human fossil was a small-brained female by the name of Lucy. Lucy was known as Australopithecus afarensis, and she existed between 3.85 and 2.95 million years ago. Human evolution, it is believed, followed a direct path from Lucy to modern woman. Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, for example, are both direct descendants of Lucy. But Lucy was tiny, whereas Paris and Kim are not, and it seems that while the latter have increased in stature relative to Lucy, their brains have failed to keep pace. The brains of Paris and Kim should have grown in proportion with their breasts, but the opposite has happened.

Members of the #MeToo movement are also direct descendants of Lucy, but although they have grown physically much larger than she was, their brains, like Paris’s and Kim’s, have remained as small, if not smaller, than Lucy’s. This puzzles scientists almost as much as it does paleoanthropologists, and frankly it also baffles yours truly.

How can some women be quick enough to seize an opportunity to get publicity and money, yet possess a brain as tiny as that of sweet old Lucy? Some scientists insist that the bigger the breasts, the smaller the brains, but this theory has been disproved time and again, especially in experiments conducted in the Groucho Marx-Bob Hope institute of human evolution.

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