Missing Link

I have in my possession a stone-age tool. It's probably one of the first ever multi-purpose kitchen gadgets – it's made of flint and is a scraper, a cutter, a chopper and a borer; all in one handy tool! At one time it must have been the pride of some stone-age housewife, fashioned for her by her bearded husband on one of his brief visits home from hunting. Foolishly, she lost it on a beach somewhere and, six thousand years later, I found it. I'd love to go back to return it.

But in terms of its age, my tool is a mere baby. Humans have been toolmakers for at least 2.5 million years and in parts of Central Africa there have been finds of man-made implements that are that old. But what I find really fascinating is that even before then, there are tools that were made not by men, but by apes. Yet apes rarely make tools anymore, meaning that those inhabiting the forests of the Congo today are not the descendants of those apes who were the toolmakers. No, for it is we who are those descendants – even though there is no archaeological evidence to prove it. The development (or evolution) of those first bipedal apes strangely appears to have petered out, only to re-appear hundreds of thousands (or possibly millions) of years later as the first bipedal human beings.

Where did we go, during that time? Why did we disappear for such a huge period of history, and why is there the missing link? It's a little bit like in Blue Peter where you never quite saw the full construction of the model, there was always "one I made earlier", so you never quite saw how it was done. Do you think this could indicate the presence of a higher being? Was von Daniken right after all, and god really was an astronaut? Maybe that's how it was done – there are the apes, very nicely developing their bipedal and tool-making skills thank you, when along comes god and says: "Oh, I can't be bothered to leave the cameras rolling while this all takes place. Come on you lot, under the counter with you." Then, after the aeons have tumbled slowly by, hey presto! he brings out the (nearly) finished item and plonks it down in the dusty plains of Chad or Kenya, or the misty jungles of the Congo, or wherever. Well if that's how it happened, I call it cheating.

And anyway, why didn't the same thing happen where man's evolution since that point is concerned? I mean, did we really have to watch the whole process from the stumbling, grunting, hair-covered Kenyanthropus platyops to, say, the supremely glabrous and highly-toned athletes we see on our tracks today? Why did the cameras continue to roll on this one? Perhaps the celestial equivalent of Valerie Singleton was worried that instead of pulling out from under the counter a Colin Jackson or a Steven Redgrave, we'd accidentally be presented with a track-suit & baseball cap-wearing, burger-eating youf? Hmm, evolution moves in mysterious ways, doesn't it?