Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight for the limited resources of Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself for the death of her family and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, they are tracked by two deadly predators: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient being who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though it were a chemistry experiment. The story is carefully researched to shared the geography, climate, and biosphere that would have been Lucy’s world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion we call ‘disaster’ today. 

Every week, I’ll post part of this story.

Here’s Part 4 (A note: While I took Lucy’s name from the infamous Australopithecine skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson, Lucy is a Homo habilis. Her adopted child Boa is an Australopithecine):

Chapter One

Raza

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.

—Margaret Mead

There the Creatures squatted, grunting noisily, no further from Raza than a well-thrown stone. Dirty clumps of hair hung to narrow shoulders. Their muscular chests tapered to pinched hips. Nut-brown skin bore only the barest layer of translucent fuzz. Their vaulted foreheads rounded high above thick rounded brows and broad muzzles—like his own, Raza thought, but flat as though Mammoth sat on them.

Raza drooped his eyes and hunkered deeper into the thick reeds across the pond from the Creatures’ camp. They were not what he expected. In fact, the only similarity to the ones he’d seen outside his home base was their movement.

Raza

They glided like Crocodile through water, with a grace belied by their over-long legs and truncated arms.

How could these winter-lean, hairless creatures be predators?

He hadn’t set out this morning to actually see them. He’d only wanted to track them. He’d waked early. He covered his body in mud and dung, barked a farewell to his Primary male Hku and set off to hunt. The day couldn’t have been more perfect. An unusual scattering of clouds shaded the parched ground with splotches of shade. Smoking Mountain slept, though Raza knew at any moment it might awaken with a ground-shaking growl, much like Eagle’s cry before her death dive or Cat’s throaty snarl. Today, though, the only indication of Smoking Mountain’s presence was a slight sulfur taste in the air.

His bare feet cut quickly through the talus field that bordered home base, across a dry patch of savanna, following the prints of Man-who-preys’.  This Creature. They were bulbous at the bottom with splayed nubs on top, like his but straighter and narrower. Depth and size varied, but the scent was always sour like spoiled roots.  Dust sprayed by his pounding feet tickled his nose and eyes and turned his dark feet a dinghy white.

When he caught the odor of pond reeds, he froze and let his senses explore what his eyes couldn’t. He ignored the ripening noxious cloud from his melting dung coat and focused on his surroundings. He heard water lapping against the pond’s shoreline and smelled the piquant scent of decayed vegetation crushed by hooves and paws and feet pounding to the water’s edge.

Nothing unusual, so he slid forward like Snake until he could see the watering hole. Its blue surface shimmered with heat like a watery flame. At one end, a herd of long-eared dik-dik and a lone hyaena-cat drank. Wave after wave of gentle ripples rolled from the pond’s edge as prey and predator alike lapped up the crystalline water. Cat’s cousin feasted on a bloated calf. A motley horde of flop-winged vultures squabbled nearby, hopping closer and closer to the cadaver, awaiting their turn. A mammoth family splashed directly in front of him, spraying their huge bodies with long noses. They trumpeted at something, flaring their ears and swaying their giant forefeet before trundling off to give Raza an unobstructed view across the pond.

At the face of the Creature. Man-who-preys. So much for his plan.

Every muscle in his body tensed and his breathing became labored. He rubbed his scarred knee as he worked through this problem. Man-who-preys was nocturnal. Raza knew this like he knew Cat attacked when she was hungry and eating meat with white worms made him sick. Were some Cousins nocturnal and others diurnal, like Cat’s cousins Leopard and Sabertooth?

He rubbed his knee harder, feeling the smooth scar left by searing lava, absently exploring the ridge where flat even skin became coarse leg fur. He’d lived his entire life on these savannas, memorized each scrub bush and boulder, every baobab and meandering border forest. He knew the carnivores that hunted him and the tricks Nature employed to prey on him. He’d felt safe until these gangly russet-colored creatures entered his life.

At that time, his band lived in a different home base, protected by cliff walls and abutting a pond. No animal bothered them there until Man-who-preys arrived. One night, as the evening shadows deepened from blue to purple, they appeared, barely visible in the faded light, watching. They never bothered the hominids and always left before Sun’s return. Hku accepted them as friendly, like Cousin Chimp, and found comfort in their silhouettes limned against the blackness knowing predators must pass Man-who-preys to attack the Group.

Then, when the herds left with their young to avoid Sun’s heat, the band’s children disappeared. Why would Man-who-preys steal children? When Raza asked Vorak, his partner shrugged.

“Why do you care? We have pairmates. We will make new children for the Group.” He glanced at Raza. “It is more difficult to replace a hunting partner. I will never let them steal you.”

Vorak, with his lean muscular build, strong prognathic snout and ready smile, made everything sound simple. When they returned from hunting, he sought out his Primary-Female. She sat as usual a hands-width from the stick she’d secured into the ground. Every day, the stick’s shadow circled the center. For some reason unknown to any in the Group, Kee placed marks along its path.

“Are we in danger, Kee?”

She stared through him, her face expressionless. He rubbed his scarred knee with the stub of a missing finger, and made his decision.

“I will find out if they are a threat.”

But meat scarce, Raza had to hunt every day, waiting for the sick or injured or old of the shrinking packs to fall to the great predators. By the time the herds returned and hunting eased, the memories of Man-who-preys had disappeared with the children.

Until now.

“This time, I will find your Camp!”

Raza crouched deeper into the reeds. Sweat dripped through his kinky fringe of black hair and etched grimy trails down his chest. As Sun climbed invisible-mountain-in-the-sky, struggling up and over the lower peaks, Raza watched the Creature. He made no sound even as a cloud of insects ate through his mud-and-dung coat and filled their bellies with his blood. Silence was his greatest defense.

Man-who-preys made many sounds. Barks and yips and hisses. Their mouths scrunched open and slammed shut into narrow flat lines as their voices varied in tone and volume. Raza too had a vast range of sounds. The guttural noise ‘Raza’, like the hiss of silence, was how groupmates called him. When he flattened his lips and squawked ‘Vorak’, his hunting partner answered. Kee’s sign was a high-pitched monotone, like Cousin Chimp greeting a playmate. But once Raza had a groupmate’s attention, he used body movements, silent communications heard by everyone. Any sound not in Nature’s language brought with it danger. How did Man-who-preys survive?

Nature tingled at the closeness of her two creations. Despite Man-who-preys ‘noisiness’, they were her most dangerous creation yet.

“You will be like him in the future, when language evolves inexorably as the oddly human trait of killing your own.”

Raza waited until each hunter disappeared from sight, carrying a tree limb taller than his body and as thick as his wrist. Then, Raza returned to Camp. Hku met him, feet spread wide, mouth set in an angry line. Raza knew solo hunting wasn’t permitted, which was why he’d returned. He wilted, not sure anymore about his plan to find Man-who-preys and save the Group.

“I will show you,” he motioned with his body and headed back to the water hole. When they got close, Hku froze and pointed out a trail of elongated prints. They lay within a stride of where Raza had been hunkered down watching the predators. The new adult gulped.

Hku scowled. “Go. Get Baad.”

Raza raced back along the traveled trail, his thoughts spinning. Had Man-who-preys been watching the Group, again as before? He found Baad, barked and motioned him to follow. Baad was a handsome hominid in his prime with powerful muscles that corded the length of his legs and bulged beneath the thick fur of his chest. He had taken the loss of the children hard. The band marked the Camp’s territory as Cat did, with the urine and feces of the male members. All Nature’s creatures knew not to cross this feral boundary, but Man-who-preys had and Raza didn’t think Baad had every recovered. Now, Baad’s jaw clenched as he bit back the memories.

When they reached Hku’s side, he pointed toward a shimmer of blue bubbling up from the horizon, where Sun slept each night. He pummeled a clenched hand into the splayed fingers of the other, blending ‘danger’ and ‘predator’. Raza rubbed his sore knee, and then forced his hands to stillness. He must focus. Hku and Baad exchanged a few words and headed out at a fast jog. Raza sprinted after them, his thick fur puffed with the satisfaction that he hunted danger. He chirped the signal that told the females to return to Camp, then screeched Eagle’s call. In the flat expanse of the grasslands, it would be heard as far away as any hunter traveled.

“Hku.” The call sign sounded like Raza clearing his throat. “How do you know it is their home base?” Who would camp at the home of a dangerous predator like Smoking Mountain? Or was Man-who-preys so mighty, like Saber-tooth and Mammoth, they had no fear?

“I once found shards of their knapping there.”

Raza sucked in a sharp breath. He had never found remnants of tool-making anywhere other than the camps of his kind. None of the predators like Cat, or the herds like Gazelle or Mammoth, used stone or wood tools. Raza squared his shoulders in pride.

“These are the creatures who steal our children?” Vorak appeared at his side. Raza nodded and both dropped into silence.

The hunters followed the prints until they melted into the scree slopes of Smoking Mountain. After a futile search, they headed back. Shadows were already slipping up the rocks by the time they hooted their entry call and rounded the boulder that marked Camp. Raza was tired, hungry and discouraged. All he wanted was his mate to groom the dirt and insects from his fur and to sleep. He’d eat tomorrow.

He listened for the clack of females pounding roots, the glee of children rough-and-tumbling, and the muted mumble of males gathering whatever meat they had scavenged that day. Instead, he saw only Kee, a slight male named Ma-g’n, and a milling pack of subadults. Raza glanced toward the food areas for other females, and then along the pond’s edge where the children usually played. No one. He frowned toward Hku. Concern clouded the elder’s dark eyes. He eased down next to Kee with a crackling of joints.

“You heard the danger signal?” Hku’s face remained calm as Kee offered a quick nod. She refused to look at him, so Hku lifted her chin until their eyes met. “Where are the others?”

Kee pulled away and went back to crushing the tiny clods of dirt that pebbled the ground. Hku patted her shoulder and rose, turning to face Raza and Vorak.

“Go.” His hand movements indicated a stealthy search of the adjoining pond, the foraging fields and protective boulders and cliffs. He added a quick bark for emphasis. “Baad. We go where the males hunted. Ma-g’n. Stay with Kee and the youngsters.”

The group split. Their bodies spoke what all felt. As Wolf howled his mournful evening call, Raza returned to find Hku surrounded by a cluster of confused males, their arms spastic and breathing shallow as they absorbed the news. Hku mouthed soft words of encouragement to each, palms down and parallel to the ground: Stay calm. We will figure this out. Raza shook his head as he met Hku’s tense gaze.

“We found only their foraging tools and a pile of roots.”

Hku lowered his head as he scratched his upper arm. Raza never doubted Hku would know what to do. When had he not known?

From within the group, a howl sounded, deep and anguished. It was Baad.

“They took our females as they did our children.” His cheek muscles bulged as he clenched his massive fists. “They are for our breeding, not theirs. Sabertooth never breeds with leopard, nor Hyaena-dog with Snarling-dog.”

Baad leaped into the air, landed, and beat the earth until the ground shook and his fists bled. Then, he threw a massive tree limb, barely missing Ma-g’n. The shock froze Baad, but for just a moment. Finally, he howled his helplessness. The youngsters looked terrified: Their belief that all in the group were safe had cracked.

Raza’s pride at his first hunt as an adult-of-the-group soured like meat rotted in the sun. What was his purpose if not to protect those around him? What mattered if not the band? Tears rolled down Ma-g’n’s frozen visage as he groomed his son Ch-hee. In this simple task, was normalcy. The child tilted his head up and offered a trusting, innocent smile. The children would recover, but what about the adults?

The next day, Hku led them to a new home base as far away as they had ever migrated. The group adopted the children-without-Primaries and the males found new pairmates from the subadults. Raza tried to forget, but no matter how exhausted his body was when he lay down to sleep, the memories intruded like rain through a canopy. Could they stop this two-legged predator? Nothing so far had succeeded. He understood Cat—when it hunted and where its territory lay. The same with Mammoth. Even with Nature, he knew how to avoid her fires and flash floods, but this predator attacked for reasons Raza didn’t understand.

“Raza. Take another pairmate. Baad took Falda. I took one.” This from Vorak as he knapped a chert stone into a cutting tool. “What do females matter except for children?”

To Raza’s surprise, Vorak had pairmated with Kelda, an abrasive, whining female shunned by all. When Raza asked about his decision, reminded Vorak she was nothing like Shta, Vorak’s first pairmate, Vorak nodded. Yes, the very reason he took her. There was no other like Shta.

Raza had no interest in finding a pairmate or raising children. In fact, he felt nothing beyond an eviscerating fury. It waxed and waned every day as he hunted with the males and played with the children of the group. At night, when his groupmates slept, he stared beyond Smoking Mountain, to the lake where his mate had been taken. He imagined what she might be doing. Did she think of the band she’d been torn from? Did she live?

In his dreams, she smiled at him across the abyss of time and distance.

When Kee could stand it no more, she sent him across the Rift, to find a mate. He agreed. It was his duty. Whoever he found needn’t know children were a distraction he couldn’t afford.

A gray drizzle filtered down from the cloud-choked sky the day Raza and Baad left. They traveled first along the forest edges, then through the copper-colored fields and toward the spread of the Great Rift. By the time they reached the

bordering forest, rain pelted the ground.  Every time Raza looked back along the traveled trail, memorizing a landmark for the return journey, he saw Hku. The old male moved from hillock to berm to mountain until finally, his image faded into the colors and textures of Raza’s homeland.

***

Nature scowled. ‘Free will’ was annoying, not unlike mosquitoes. It popped up at the most inopportune times making it impossible to be sure what her creations would do. Free will was the reason Raza now sought the female Lucy . What if Lucy joined him?

Nature shook her head. No, Lucy would never leave her homeland. Lucy felt a fascinating emotion called ‘love’ for the hominid Garv. Though he had disappeared, with Nature’s help, Lucy  woke each day with the hope he would reappear.

Another odd emotion Nature didn’t understand, this ‘hope’. Why did the female cling to Garv over the competent and virile Ghael? Ghael could provide for her, create her babies and insure her place in the band. Still, Lucy only agreed to be his pairmate until Garv reappeared.

What had caused ‘emotion’? One day, the chemistry was pristine; the next, some cataclysmic combination occurred in Nature’s Lucy experiment. First free will, then a conscience, and now emotion. Surely these were flaws in her artistry, mutations that would be bred from the species over the fullness of time. Until then, Nature would use them to bind Lucy to the past rather than the hope of a new beginning.

Nature raised a cloudy finger to her ethereal chin and scratched a rumble across the arboreal landscape. Was this when Lucy would ask her for help?

Want to be notified when Lucy: A Biography is published? Click here.

Part V next week…

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_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and author of two technology training books for middle school. She wrote Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman. She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a tech columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for ISTE’s Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s editing a thriller for her agent that should be be out to publishers this summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

This second video shares a bit of informatrion about the group who were lucky enough to have the house call:

Who was Lucy?

Finally after ten years, I am close to publishing the heart-rending and fast-paced biography of Lucy. Written in the spirit of Jean Auel, this is the paleo-historic  saga of our earliest ancestors as lived through the eyes of a female Homo habilis. Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like, Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start?

Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight for the limited resources of Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself for the death of her family and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, they are tracked by two deadly predators: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient being who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though it were a chemistry experiment. The story is carefully researched to shared the geography, climate, and biosphere that would have been Lucy’s world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion we call ‘disaster’ today. 

Every week, I’ll post part of this story.

Here’s Part 3 (A note: While I took Lucy’s name from the infamous Australopithecine skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson, Lucy is a Homo habilis. Her adopted child Boa is an Australopithecine):

Prologue

In the Beginning… 

…it is difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature; but I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us.

—Charles Darwin 

 Billions of years whooshed by in such a rush, it made Sun dizzy. Planetary systems formed and life evolved and still Sun couldn’t decide. This Machiavellian monstrosity who called herself ‘Nature’ cared nothing for Earth. She collided vast landmasses with such brutality that the ground buckled into crenulated piles of lofty mountains and deep valleys, or splintered into ragged continents that floated away on infinite oceans. Molten hotspots blew liquid rock through the fragile crust and splattered volcanic archipelagos like multi-layered onions. The erratic climate melted glaciers and rainforests with equal ease.

Sun sighed. Nature’s life forms were no better. They came and went, crushed by Earth’s ever-changing habitat. The survivors, like the desultory horsetail ferns or the annoying chirruping insects, were boring. The first had no flexibility and the second, no mental strength. Sun turned her attention to other planets in her system, until the day a muscular, slope-shouldered hominid named Orrorin appeared. Though his head was no larger than what Nature called a ‘chimpanzee’, a human soul radiated through his eyes. Who was he? He fingered his food as though wondering at its texture. Hostility intrigued rather than frightened him. Had Nature finally done something spectacular?

One morning, when Sun began her daily duties warming and lighting Planet Earth, Orrorin had disappeared, replaced by the ape-man Ardipithecus. His clear-eyed gaze roved the land with a calculated interest. He rubbed callused fingers over the plants and sniffed their scents, even tasted the seeds and dirt around them. He cocked his oversized head up and scratched behind his ear as though he knew Sun watched—and vanished faster than Orrorin. The captivating female who replaced him was the first to recognize the concatenation of cause and affect that flowed through the land and animal life, responsible for the migration of herds and the springtime birth of babies. She, too, disappeared, replaced by a different bipedal—bigger here and stronger there.

One after another, the primate hominids came and went in a great evolving rush of kindred species, nothing more than failures in Nature’s evolutionary lab. What game did Nature play with the lives of these sentient creatures? Sun lost any but a passing interest in Earth’s parade of life.

That changed when the Homo habilis Lyta arrived. Something about this skinny primate’s mix of bravery and loyalty, her unpredictable intelligence and selfless compassion, fascinated Sun.

Nature giggled. Sun would never understand evolution. All matter must be destroyed to be improved. Sun, also, when its time came. Nature alone decided who lived and died. In other parts of the Universe, she was called god.

She giggled again. She was a god. 

Click here to be notified when Lucy: A Biography is published

 To make the big-brained Homo habilis more interesting, Nature gave him free will. She hoped a modicum of independence, a separation from the traditional reliance on instinct, would empower habilis to act in its own best interest

She got more than she expected. With choice came a conscience. That wasn’t the plan, but science was unpredictable. Nature had started over more times than she could count in her quest for perfection, but a conscience? How do you do what must be done if you worry about consequences?

Nature puckered her brow and studied her creation with a predator’s unwavering attention. Several minutes passed and then several more. Storms came and went. Flash floods crashed through the valleys and lightning blackened the grasslands with devastating fires. Finally, the worry lines that framed her eyes disappeared and the corners of her mouth tugged up into what might pass for a smile. There was a solution.

She cleaved her newest creation in two. One half she called ‘Lyta’ and planted in the rainforest. The half called ‘Raza’ she dropped on the savanna. If Lyta ‘wished’ or ‘prayed’ or simply asked, Nature would guide her to salvation. Raza, she left to his own barbaric inclinations. To be sure they couldn’t meet, she created a savage uncrossable fissure between their homelands.

“Now I will create their opposite. He will be smart and aggressive, as are they, but without morals. His focus will be his survival without concern for those around him.

“Which will succeed?”

Part IVa next week…

Want to be notified when Lucy: A Biography is published? Click here.

Follow me

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and author of two technology training books for middle school. She wrote Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman. She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a tech columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for ISTE’s Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s editing a thriller for her agent that should be be out to publishers this summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

Enter Google's second annual science fair by April 1, 2012 and win a $50k college scholarship--just for doing what you do best

Lucy is the hominid in the middle. The others--part of her band.

female Homo habilis. Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start? Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight for the limited resources of Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself for the death of her family and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, they are tracked by two deadly predators: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient being who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though it were a chemistry experiment. The story is carefully researched to shared the geography, climate, and biosphere that would have been Lucy’s world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion we call ‘disaster’ today. 

Every week, I’ll post part of this story.

Here’s Part 2 of the Preface. If you missed Part 1, click here (A note: While I took Lucy’s name from the infamous Australopithecine skeleton discovered by Donald Johanson, Lucy is a Homo habilis. Her adopted child Boa is an Australopithecine):

This is her story. She is a scientist, forever seeking new approaches to problems. She was the first primate to use tools to make tools, to control her environment and select among choices rather than submit to instinct when making decisions about her future. She uses her capacious brain, requiring 20% of her caloric intake to maintain, to survive and multiply in the most dangerous habitat known to mammals. She spends considerable time foraging for anything edible (evolving from a plant-eating herbivore to a decidedly-unchoosey omnivore was a brilliantly adaptive move for early man), sleeping, caring for her young, and avoiding predators. Because she is so much more efficient at these jobs than any other primate, she possesses surplus time and uses it inventing tools to enhance her quality of life and communicating with her band. This is the first time in history a mammal surpassed Maslow’s broadest Hierarchy of Needs.

As tectonic forces buried deep beneath the African continent tear East from West and a series of active volcanoes bordering Lyta’s homeland clog the air with ash and wash the landscape with rivers of fire, she and her kind are adapting to the evolving environment by changing the way they do things. Her predecessors possessed no skills for recognizing a problem, realizing the need for change, and solving it. She is able to identify a crisis and wrangle an adaptation from Nature. Lyta is a mentally gifted hominid, yet modern man sees her as barbaric and crude. Someday, maybe 1.7 millions years from today, some scientific writer will try to explain the actions of the ancient species, Homo sapiens sapiens. In his lense, we will appear primeval, incapable of thoughts meriting “modern man’s” attention.

Click here to be notified when Lucy is published

It is with this perspective I present these noble creatures. I make no claim to original investigations. To steal the words of E.A. Allen, in his 1885 The Prehistoric World, I trust “…it will not be considered impertinent for a mere loiterer in the vestibule of the temple of science to attempt to lay before others the results of the investigations of our eminent scholars.” Their manner of speaking, the primal grammar and sentence structure, has been lost, so I follow the research of Dr. Lev Vygotsky on primitive societies. He found primitive man to be a thorough communicator, his conversations filled with detail about his surroundings and even of places he only once visited. Lyta’s communication isn’t limited to words, but includes a smorgasbord of devices to convey her message—vocalizations, body movements, hand gestures, intonation, facial expressions—skills we only vaguely understand and often discredit. I have translated her words and those of her band into a Homo sapiens sapiens-friendly language.

Additionally, primitive man had no concept of counting or numbers. To convey this in a manner more appropriate to their time, I used the research of Dr. Lev Vygotsky—again—and Dr. Levi Leonard Conant from his 1931 book, The Number Concept. For example, Lyta will never say that her band consisted of fifteen individuals, rather she will describe a band with “enough females to gather fruit and nuts and care for the children, and enough males to hunt scavenge and protect the band”. While ‘fifteen people’ is more concise, to her it is meaningless.

Often, you will be tempted to disbelieve her life. Once again, fact is truly stranger than any fiction a creative Thinking Man brain can invent.

Part 3–next week…

Want to be notified when Lucy: A Biography is published? Click here.

Follow me

Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and author of two technology training books for middle school. She wrote Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman. She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a tech columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for ISTE’s Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s seeking representation for a techno-thriller Any suggestions? Contact Jacqui at her writing office, WordDreams, or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

I’ve posted the first part of it and a link to the balance. Enjoy!

How to Ace a Google Interview

By WILLIAM POUNDSTONE

Imagine a man named Jim. He’s applying for a job at Google. Jim knows that the odds are stacked

How do you get out before the blades start churning? Photo illustration photography by F. Martin Ramin for the WSJ

against him. Google receives a million job applications a year. It’s estimated that only about 1 in 130 applications results in a job. By comparison, about 1 in 14 high-school students applying to Harvard gets accepted.

Jim’s first interviewer is late and sweaty: He’s biked to work. He starts with some polite questions about Jim’s work history. Jim eagerly explains his short career. The interviewer doesn’t look at him. He’s tapping away at his laptop, taking notes. “The next question I’m going to ask,” he says, “is a little unusual.”

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

The interviewer looks up from his laptop, grinning like a maniac with a new toy.

“I would take the change in my pocket and throw it into the blender motor to jam it,” Jim says.

The interviewer’s tapping resumes. “The inside of a blender is sealed,” he counters, with the air of someone who’s heard it all before. “If you could throw pocket change into the mechanism, then your smoothie would leak into it.”

“Right… um… I would take off my belt and shirt, then. I’d tear the shirt into strips to make a rope, with the belt, too, maybe. Then I’d tie my shoes to the end of the rope and use it like a lasso.”

Furious key clicks.

“I don’t mean a lasso,” Jim plows on. “What are those things Argentinian cowboys throw? It’s like a weight at the end of a rope.”

No answer. Jim now realizes that his idea is lame, but he feels compelled to complete it. “I’d throw the weights over the top of the blender jar. Then I’d climb out.”

“The ‘weights’ are just your shoes,” the interviewer says. “How would they support your body’s weight? You weigh more than your shoes do.”

Jim doesn’t know. That’s the end of it. The interviewer begins ticking off quibbles one by one. He isn’t sure whether Jim’s shirt—shrunken with the rest of him—could be made into a rope that would be long enough. Once Jim got to the top of the jar—if he got there—how would he get down again? Could he realistically make a rope in 60 seconds?

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and author of two technology training books for middle school. She wrote Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman. She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a tech columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for ISTE’s Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s seeking representation for a techno-thriller Any suggestions? Contact Jacqui at her writing office, WordDreams, or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

Who was Lucy?

Finally after ten years, I am close to publishing the heart-rending and fast-paced biography of Lucy. Written in the spirit of Jean Auel, this is the paleo-historic  saga of our earliest ancestors as lived through the eyes of a female Homo habilis. Since Donald Johanson uncovered the tiny three-and-a-half foot clawless, flat-toothed Australopithecine, we have asked, Who is she? And how could she survive in a world of mammoth predators and unrelenting natural disasters she had no understanding about? This book answers those questions as well as more fundamental ones like Where did God come from? Why did man create his first tool? How did culture start? Here’s a summary:

Lucy: A Biography follows three species of early man (Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus), as they fight over the limited resources of Plio-Pleistocene Africa. Lucy, of the species habilis, blames herself  when her family is trampled by an enraged herd of mammoth and agrees to mate with a stranger (Raza). As they journey to Raza’s homebase, two deadly predators track them: Xha, of the smarter and more powerful species Homo erectus, and the violent and unforgiving Nature, a sentient spirit who meddles with fate and Lucy’s future as though a chemistry experiment. The geography, biosphere and climate are carefully researched to represent what Lucy would have faced in a world 1.8 million years ago, when man was not King and nature ruled with a violence and dispassion unimaginable today. 

Every week, I’ll post part of this story. Here’s Part 1 of the Preface:

PREFACE

“Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is

fragmentary and open to various interpretations.”

Henry Gee, Nature 2001

Like a favonian breeze, life arrived on Planet Earth about 3.5 billion years ago. Our story begins much later, a brief two million years before present, during the waning days of the Pliocene Epoch, itself part of the 65-million-year-long Cenozoic Era. The primordial continent of Gondwana has splintered into chunks and warm-blooded, furry mammals have replaced the dinosaurs. The climate is cooling and the growing glaciers have locked billions of gallons of Earth’s water into icy prisons. South America has moved to its present position contiguous to North America and the land bridge connecting Asia with Alaska still exists.

If you telescope in, you’ll see we are in Africa.

Before becoming the seed bed for man’s future, Africa separated from South America—almost 200 million years ago—and then from India and Australia seventy million years later. The capacious tropical jungles created during hotter Miocene times have given way to dry savannas reaching like stretch lines around the Great Rift Valley. If you peer closer, you see a child. Half-ape, half-human, she peopled the landscape long before modern man arrived. She hunts, plays, eats and sleeps, oblivious to her destiny as the Father of Man. We’ll call her Lyta. That’s not her name, rather the sound she hears when her band requires her attention.

For some reason scientists will probably never agree on, Lyta prospered in this cobbled confluence of climate and geography. All we can do is study the cairns she left and ask why, out of all animal species, did she and her successors survive Nature’s challenges and spread worldwide? The physically-overpowering Great Apes are endemic to one habitat. Crocodylus, unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, lives confined to the world’s wetlands. Insects, who have outnumbered man for four hundred million years, remain subjugated to nature’s whims.

So, it’s an intriguing question: Why did bipedal primates with paper-thin skin, nails instead of claws and hair instead of fur, metastize throughout the world? What crude traits made Lyta a survivor? The answer is in the stony coffin of rocks and calcified soil Earth wrapped around her fossilized remains, broken by the weight of history and gnawed by predators and rodents and in the end, bacteria.

To write her biography, these scattered clues must be matched like puzzle pieces until their morphology gives up the story of her life and death. The swell of the cheeks, the shape of the jaw and teeth, and the spread of the nasal cavity define the sensory tools. The length of the femur and its connection to the pelvis calculate height, and thickness dictates body strength. Framework established, the forensic anthropologist attaches muscles and tendons to the bones, overlays skin—thick or thin, light or dark—depending upon age and culture. Last, he adds eyes, nose, mouth, and hair, the final pieces of the phenotypic exterior. The result breathes life into the foggy detachment of technicalities.

We might be shocked by Lyta’s resemblance to us. She walks upright. Her face is well on the way to Thinking Man’s forward-facing eyes, receding forehead, and understated nose. Her skin is lightly furred and

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dimpled with millions of sweat glands. Her gluteus maximus has enlarged to facilitate running and her thorax has raised so she can draw the deep breaths required to fuel her cells for extended jogging. The encephalization of her brain represents a milestone in primates:  She is the first species to on average surpass the cerebral rubicon set by the British anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith requiring 750 cubic centimeters to delineate the genus Homo from all other species.

But physical appearance tells only part of her story. To relate Lyta’s biography requires we extrapolate the intangible parts lost in the vastness of time from the archaeological remains studied by experts such as the Leakeys, Donald Johanson, Birute Galdikas, Jane Goodall, Ian Tattersall, Christopher Wills, John McDougall. How did Lyta conduct her every-day life? How did she handle illness? How did she hunt for food while stalked by predators bigger and meaner than she? How did Nature mold her life? How did she solve her problems?

For these answers, we look to a multidisciplinary assortment of scientists. Paleobotanists study plant seeds buried with her bones. Paleoanthropologists examine the condition of her teeth and calcification of her skeleton. Paleontologists study the tools she created to infer their probable use. Paleogeologists dig through the horizons in the land, the geologic content of rocks and soil, the detritus surrounding the ossified skeleton. Paleoclimatologists recreate the composition of ancient atmospheres. By melding their collective research, Lyta’s life comes into focus, as though a mist has lifted, revealing tiny hominids striding across the savannas of Plio-Pleistocene Africa.

Yet, even this fails to convey the compelling provenance of her existence. Where are the inevitable life and death struggles accompanying days and nights ruled by Nature? Where is the stress that travels hand in hand with her ability to make decisions? Where is the drama integral to existence as a thinking man? As Terry Pratchett says, “…there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber…” For with Lyta’s ability to reason came the need to take responsibility for her deeds.

Part 2–next week…

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and author of two technology training books for middle school. She wrote Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman. She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a tech columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for ISTE’s Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s seeking representation for a techno-thriller Any suggestions? Contact Jacqui at her writing office, WordDreams, or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

Filed under: amazing science, Early man, Homo habilis, Lucy serialized, Lyta ]]> http://delamagente.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/lucy-a-biography-part-i/feed/ 1 33.570112 -117.697436 33.570112 -117.697436 worddreams 116012092_177696cec2 lucy subscribe http://delamagente.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/happy-holidays/ http://delamagente.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/happy-holidays/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:37:34 +0000 Jacqui Murray http://delamagente.wordpress.com/?p=2773 ]]> I’ll be taking a week (or so) off–until after the New Year–to play with my children and work on some writing projects with a deadline. I may add a post here or there, or drop in on you-all as you enjoy your holidays, but mostly I’ll be regenerating.

I wish you a wonderful season, safe and filled with family. See you shortly!

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and author of two technology training books for middle school. She wrote Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman. She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a tech columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for ISTE’s Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s seeking representation for a techno-thriller Any suggestions? Contact Jacqui at her writing office, WordDreams, or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, while both male and female reindeer grow antlers in the summer each year, male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late

November to mid-December. Female reindeer retain their antlers till after they give birth in the spring. Therefore, according to EVERY historical rendition depicting Santa’s reindeer, EVERY single one of them, from Rudolph to Blitzen, had to be a girl. We should’ve known… ONLY women would be able to drag a fat man in a red velvet suit all around the world in one night and not get lost.

A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!

Photo credit: Zazzle.com