Who Ate the First Oyster?

inventor?

 

I'll call her Ma, because she was a young mother, who like all inventors, had a problem.

 

Ma was born approximately 3 million years ago and belonged to an ancient ancestor species of ours called Australopithecus. She was born in Africa, perhaps Eastern Africa, where archaeologists have discovered a concentration of australopithecine fossils, including the famous "Lucy" found in 1974. Three million years ago is approximately halfway from the time when our species first split from the chimpanzee and bonobo line to the modernday, so it's no surprise that in appearance and behavior, Ma represents a middle ground between H. sapiens and chimpanzees.

 

She stood almost four feet tall, weighed a lithe sixty-five pounds, and other than on her hairless face she was covered in thick dark fur. Ma ate more meat than a modern chimp does, but she scavenged it rather than killed it. Ma supplemented her meals with roots, tubers, nuts, and fruits. In many respects, a modern observer might mistake her for a remarkably well-balanced, walking chimp, save for her peculiar, dexterous, and inventive use of rocks. To aid her work scavenging carcasses, Ma sharpened stones to cut into bones for marrow, which allowed her to eat meat other scavengers couldn't access.

 

Ma was a clever ape, but to many of Africa's big cats, she was still lunch. During the day she walked upright in search of food, but at night she clambered back into a tree nest to avoid nocturnal predators. Archaeologists have found australopithecine femurs and arm bones in caves adjacent to complete predator skeletons, which is a clear but grim signal of who was eating whom.

 

The predators interested in Ma were varied. She lacked fire and as a result found herself particularly vulnerable to a hunter similar to the modern panther, but she occupied a rung so low on the food chain that even eagles made the occasional meal out of australopithecines.

 

Her inability to start and control fir