THE RIVER APES™
Stories of Our Ancestors
Keeping Warm by the Fire
The sparks from the fire shot up into the black sky, like shooting stars. Branches from the laurel crackled loudly releasing a sudden but final burst of heat. The fire was dying down now. It was not a cold evening, but the warmth of the fire was very welcome anyway.
The eldest male of the tiny tribe sat lazily on the grass, watching the branches glowing, studying the flames flickering all around. He felt very content. He had selected a good female, the best. She had given birth to three wonderful children and another would be joining them soon. What more could he want?
His son expertly poked the fire with a long branch he'd carefully chosen. The eldest of two daughters watched and tried to do the same. She wanted to impress her brother to get his respect, but he refused to show her any even though, secretly, he did respect her. He was still the most senior child and she mustn't ever forget it.
The youngest one ran around the fire, playing at holding her breath as she darted through the smoke on the down-wind side. She burst into giggles as she made it to the fresh air next to her brother, still poking his stick around in the embers. He was wondering about something, as usual.
"Daddy?" asked Kestutis, suddenly. "When did humans first discover fire?"
I started to answer, as usual, before really thinking. "Well it was the Neanderthals that first used fire. But nobody knows how they discovered it." I offered, unconvincingly.
'Neanderthals?' I thought to myself, 'They weren't our ancestors, were they?' I couldn't remember. I became a little embarrassed at my lack of knowledge. 'I should know this' I thought, 'I did a degree in it, for heaven's sake.'
"Just think" I announced, "our cave-men ancestors from thousands of years ago must have sat around fires just like this."
My two girls, Laima and Zemyna, loved this idea and immediately started playing at being cave-men, running around the fire making primitive noises.
This all happened on bonfire night of 1995, and over the next few days I resolved to find out about Neanderthals and cave-men and fire so that I could give the children better answers next time.
By Christmas, I'd re-learnt much of the stuff about human evolution that I'd forgotten from university. Neanderthals were not believed to be our ancestors after all, more like distant cousins. I must say I surprised myself with how interested I was in the subject.*
I read as many books as I could get through and every time I'd end up feeling dissatisfied. I'd find myself asking questions like "So why did apes start walking?" or "Why did we loose our fur?" More often than not the problem was completely ignored. "Unknown" was the word that kept cropping up and whenever the author offered a selection of guesses, I was never very impressed by them.
All the books seemed to be fixed on the same basic assumption. That chimpanzee-like apes had got down from the trees and began walking across the hot African savannah grass-lands.
"Nah! I don't believe it," I thought. "There must be a better explanation."
Rozalija's Birth
Lesley, my wife, is a midwife and she was confident that our fourth child should be born at home. (She also decided that she would be born on the 28th of December at 9:30pm but exactly how she was able to do that is another story!)
To help with the pains of labour, Lesley hired a birthing pool. It took over an hour to construct and fill it with warm water but it was worth the effort. The pool definitely helped her through some of the most severe contractions although for the actual delivery, Lesley felt more comfortable to leave the pool. Rozalija was born on our living room settee at 9:30pm on the 28th December, exactly as planned!
It was a wonderful day and as baby Rozalija lay between us in our bed that night, making those sweet little "muzzly" noises that only newly born babies do, a million thoughts bounced around my mind …
'I'm sure Lesley would have given birth in the pool if it had been deeper or if the midwife could have got in with her.' 'Why should that be?' 'Why would women want to give birth in water, anyway?' 'Wasn't there a program on TV recently about this?' 'Yes. It was that Desmond Morris. He'd said that perhaps our ancestors went through an aquatic phase.' 'Yes, that's right. Lesley had shown me an article in the Sunday Times about it.'
The next day, Rozalija's first, we just slobbed about. I made a fire in the living room, Lesley started her recovery from the birth day's trauma. We ate turkey and Christmas Pudding, read the paper and watched television. The kids played with their Christmas presents and I … played on the internet.
I wanted to find out more about this "Aquatic phase" and I began to "surf the net." It wasn't long before a pattern seemed to be emerging. There were lots of people (almost always men) who seemed very irritated and angry even with the idea that anyone could suggest humans might have evolved from an aquatic phase. Then there was a woman called Elaine Morgan and her supporters, who appeared to have answers to the questions that my text books had dodged.
As Rozalija grew so did my interest and support of this Aquatic Ape Theory. It became my obsession and I decided to use my imagination to explain it to my children (and myself) and tried to work out what might have actually happened to our ancestors by writing a set of stories called… The River Apes.
There are ten stories in all. Each one tells one stage of the journey from ape to human, by telling tales about characters that lived there.
You’ll notice that at the bottom of every page there is an image of a river, but this is a river with a difference. It flows from left to right showing every generation from Upemaa, mother of the first river ape through to my children. At first only a single dot represents a lifetime, so great is the number of years covered. But as we get closer to today the river gets more detailed. At various points on the river, we will zoom in to see pictures of characters, a family tree in detail or a map of where the characters in the stories lived.
These characters are all fictitious, of course, except the most recent ones. They are all just stories, after all, but they have been written in the belief that, to some extent, they describe what must have actually happened.
For those interested in the scientific side of the stories, I have written some "Notes for Students." Look out for a '*' at the end of sentences if you want to find out more.
Before we get on with the River Apes though, I want to introduce to you a vital piece of equipment we shall be using over and over again: Our Time Machine.
The Time Machine
Imagine that in the corner of your room there was a fantastic machine. One that could take you to any place at any time. We can use it as often as we like and it is free. If you’ve seen the Robert Zemeckis film "Back to the Future", you can visualise it as being a bit like Doc Brown’s time machine. But ours isn’t a Delorian, and doesn’t have to get up to 88.8 mph or use 1.21 Giga Watts of electricity to work. All you need is a good imagination. Also, we can go anywhere as well as any time.
Let’s try it out now. Come on. Let’s climb in. We’ll start with something easy - how about yesterday? Do you remember what you did? Think about it for a moment. Can you see yourself? Now let's go back to last Saturday? I’ll just key in the date… Is it working? What about last year? What were you doing then? Should we try to go back to see your earliest memory? Do you know how old you were then?
Let me take you on a little trip to my first memory in a little Nottinghamshire mining town. Hold on. September 17th 1962. Kirkby-in-Ashfield railway station. Can you see that mother and child standing there on the platform in the dark? Let’s zoom in closer and have a look. What a handsome little boy. He’s only three. By the way, that’s me! My mum and me are waiting for a train to take us to see my Dad, who’s just had a terrible accident. Now look! Can you see the train coming into the station? If you look closely, you’ll see the fire coming out of the side of the engine. It’s a steam train.
Ok, enough of that. Let’s zoom back further and see what your grandparents were doing when they were younger. We can go anywhere and any time remember. It's an amazing thing, but if you think about it, there was someone from your family and mine alive at any time you choose in history. Let’s go back to the last World War. This finished in 1945. So we should choose a year a little earlier let's say 28th February 1940. It was a terrible time and millions of people were killed in the most horrible ways imaginable. But don’t worry, we’re quite safe in our time machine. If we zoom back to 1941, to my father's country, Lithuania, and a village called Alizava… Yes there it is. Can you see that farm house down there?
That was where he used to live. Let's zoom in and see if we can find him. I think that's him there. That young man there with blonde hair, walking away from that little farmhouse. It’s my Dad going to the army. He looks sad. Can you see the tears in his eyes? He’s right to cry. He doesn’t know it but he’ll never see that farmhouse again and fifty years will pass before he returns to his homeland. We could go and see my mother's country Romania too, but we’re running out of time now. So where should we go next? We could go back to the First World War. My grandparents lived through that. In fact we could go back to any great event in history and we’d find our relatives there somewhere.
Maybe we should journey to the middle ages, before guns and factories, when most people lived on the land. We could find our ancestors and see how they lived their lives. We might recognise something in their face or the way they behave in ourselves. Or maybe we should go back further, to the adventures our forefathers might have had living in Roman times, or even before that, in the Iron Age. Maybe it was your ancestors that discovered how to make the first tools out of metal. Going back this far, we might not see much resemblance to ourselves at all.
But why mess about with hundreds of years when this machine can take us back millions, just as easily. What was it like, say seven million years ago? Where were your relatives? You can be sure they must have been alive there somewhere. This long ago, every human being alive today must have shared the same ancestors. But what did they look like? Were they even human beings?
As the River Apes stories are told we’ll be using the time machine again and again to learn exactly how apes evolved into humans. We’ll discover who Adam and Eve really were, where they lived and what they looked like. And we’ll find out what happened to their children and their children’s children. We’ll track their descendants down history through your grandparents right up to you, yourself, today.
The River Apes are just a set of stories. Nobody will ever know how close to the truth they are. But whether they are true or not, remember, the life and times they describe were shared by your very own ancestors. They were there somewhere, alive, eating, sleeping, and thinking. Just imagine it!
Algis Kuliukas
February 1996
To find out more about The River Apes e-mail :algis@RiverApes.com
© Algis Kuliukas 2000 All Rights Reserved
For children with Batten's Disease, their Parents and their Brothers and Sisters.