Some scientists say that there has been no biological change in human beings for 40,000 or 50,000 years.
Oh? And what about Alley Oop?
There was a time — a prehistoric one — when Alley, familiar to some of us in younger times as a comic-book character, was riding his pet dinosaur Dinny and protecting the lithesome Ooola with his stone axe. Since then, he has come a long way, and so, probably, has Ooola, baby.
While watching the Olympics in Sochi last week, I learned that Alley Oop has given his name to a gravity-defying manoeuvre on a snowboard.
And as the Games progressed, it was reported that 900,000-year-old footprints of an adult and several kids not much younger than today’s snowboarders were discovered on the Norfolk coast last May. There was no suggestion that they were performing 180-degree airborne spins.
They were padding about on a muddy estuary. Perhaps they were a family of Oops looking for weeds or termites to eat. Perhaps the prints were left by a prehistoric class on a nature outing.
If they’d not been fooling around and had been paying attention, those kids might have seen mammoths, hippos and rhinos.
This doesn’t seem to have interested the scientists, though. What excited them was that those prints were proof that hominids — our ancestors — had wandered far from the birthplace of our species in Africa much sooner and much farther than had been thought.
Those who left the prints, and others who have left no evidence of their time there, wouldn’t have stuck around long, though. The increasing cold would have driven them back over the land bridge south to mingle with others of their kind in what is now Spain, and vary their diet by eating one another.
Our species’ increasing reluctance to engage in cannibalism, surely, is another sign that we’re still evolving. Most of us, I presume, still eat meat of other kinds. It keeps us fierce and fitter to survive.
But more and more folk today seem to forswear flesh of any kind and will eat only leaves, seeds and gluten-free twigs. I’m not sure whether that’s an evolutionary advance or a retreat.
Surely, no one watching today’s Olympians, some only 15, stomping landings or triple-toe twerking on ice, can believe that athletes today are no better than those of the past.
Records are broken continuously. A personal best is a fleeting statistic.
I have a fondness for sedate cross-country skiing, but the newest sports are more exciting. I have to keep telling myself not to try this at home.
If survival of the fittest still plays a role in the human condition, today’s Olympians should be OK. So should those to whom they pass their jumping genes.
But there are those scientists who say that once human species began replacing the Neanderthals about 40,000 years ago, natural selection became no longer a vital factor except, perhaps, in parts of Africa where mutations are the only hope, still, for surviving diseases that kill.
Particularly in the developed world, the rest of our species relies on medicine and technology for survival, much as the new Olympians rely on the equipment and clothing that technology has developed to make them faster, higher, stronger.
Features like blue eyes and dark skin still might be selected, but human beings haven’t developed new emotions or new ways of knowing things since they began painting in caves and improving tools and weapons.
But do we need new emotions when we’ve become so proficient in suppressing those that we have? Do we need new cognitive abilities when we’ve developed computers to do a lot of thinking for us?
Or when we ignore so much of what we know and won’t contemplate what we don’t know? When we ignore, for instance, signs that we are risking the destruction of the planet and human existence as we know it, and don’t worry about what happens to whom when we’ve gone?
We’re excited by clues to our past. But we rely on assumptions of the present as guarantees for the future.
Like Alley and the little Oops.
