An Evolution of Lies

While I was throwing out old newspapers recently, I stumbled upon a TV Weekly, or whatever it’s called, which had an illustration relevant to PBS’s special on Evolution as its cover, since that program was supposed to be the highlight of that week. When I saw it, it immediately reminded me of a qualm I’ve had since high school – why the funk is the fellow at the end of the evolutionary gamut not black, if the first humans on Earth were darkies? The first man, as depicted on the chart has a ruddy complexion, but he’s still definitely a pale face. Why the discrepancy?

The frickin' "hu" in human is short for "hue," which itself means pigment. Everyone, at least in the scientific community, knows about Eve. Every encyclopedia I’ve read acknowledges the people referred to as Australoid, known familiarly as the Aborigines, are the oldest "race" on the planet. (Yea, those people that too few know founded the Indus River Civilization, migrated all the way from India to Australia millennia before the rest of the world knew what direction was north, and might have been North America’s first colonizers.) Vitamin D synthesis as a description of how pale-skinned people ("Caucasoids," "Mongoloids") arose on our planet has been around at least 25 years.

So why, I emphatically posit again, haven't I ever seen one stinkin' illustration of evolution that got it right?! Why have I never seen a brown personage at the end of the line of more and more erect-standing creatures?