PointyHairedJedi
07-24-2005, 02:39 PM
“Five-Minute Man” unearthed in Canada
At first sight the fossilized bones of homo finverinius are not much to look at. The remains, discovered last year in cold and bleak northern Saskech... Sastketchew... in cold and bleak northern Canada at an archaeological dig in the Skadoobiedoobeewop Mountains, were at first thought to be nothing out of the ordinary. It was only when they were examined in more detail, half a year later, at the University of Ottawa, that their true import began to be realised.
Professor Martin Scrungewick is the head of the Archeology department at the U of O, and it was he who first noticed that the some of the remains that had been shipped from northern Canada were a little out of the ordinary. When I met him last week he kindly explained the initial discovery to me.
“We'd just received this crate of finds from the dig in Sas... er, northern Canada, you see, and as far as we knew there wasn't anything special in there. The remains were all supposed to be of homo slouchus, who as you probably don't know, just being a journalist and all, are an ancestor of ours who lived approximately forty-seven million years ago during the Platonic Era. Anyway, as they were being gone over and cataloged, one of the undergrads noticed that there was something a bit funny about one particular set of bones, thinking perhaps that they'd been included by mistake as they obviously weren't slouchus. I could see right away that these were very damn peculiar, though I didn't realise until after some consultation with my colleagues that we might have a whole new ancestor of man on our hands.”
The story of homo finverinius, or Five-Minute Man as he has come to be known, is surprisingly not a new one. To get to the beginning we have to go back to 1927, when a Canadian government-sponsored expedition which was mapping previously unexplored territory (everything north of Winnipeg was blank on maps of the day) came across a cave system near Stony Rapids containing ancient wall paintings. They documented the find, including making a number of sketches of it. They went on their way after a brief few days, and the caves lay silent for another six years until a wandering band of archaeologists, bored with digging up dead lizards and intrigued by the mapping expedition's sketches, went in search of the wall paintings.
They were far more extensive than the original expedition had supposed. Many fascinating things were discovered – a crude representation of what looks surprisingly like a stylized clock, a flame-haired warrior goddess who derived her power from a mysterious black liquid and who could stare her enemies into submission, many pictures of what are unmistakably cedar trees, a man in what looks like a top hat being killed over and over, and several complete sets of what were later determined to be instructions for making pie. There were also, as in many other cave paintings around the world, representations of hunting, but with a difference – they were much more condensed that such paintings normally are, and also, unusually, displayed an odd kind of humour.
Indeed, one of the strangest things about Five-Minute Man was his apparently highly developed (for the era) sense of humour, though their religion was also highly developed, something that is extremely unusual among the peoples of the Platonic Era. Their pantheon of gods, led by the flame-haired goddess, also included a god who wore a symbolistic headpiece (possibly some kind of fertility device) and could talk certain of his enemies to death; a god who fell from his high place and experienced the worst of both worlds, but who was saved; a god who fought in a terrible war in the heavens and was eventually cast into flame; and a god who didn't seem to do anything much except get beaten up. Each of these deities had their own pantheon of lesser beings who represented their own allies and enemies; and on top of this there were a large group of minor gods. The relationships between them all have even yet to be fully discovered, but you get some idea of the complexity of Five-Minute Man's religion.
Of course, the existence of Five-Minute Man remained purely hypothetical for the next seventy-odd years, and the link between the paintings and the unearthed bones might never have been discovered had not anthropologist Felicity Squirrels, who had long been fascinated by the mystery of the lost culture, visited the University of Ottawa a month after the bones had arrived.
“I was visiting a friend of mine at the Archaeology Department and she mentioned that there was a bit of a buzz around because they might have discovered, among a batch of finds that had been sent from a dig in Sask... northern Canada, a previously unknown ancestor of ours, so naturally I wanted to go and see. Of course, there's no way I could have made the link just looking at the bones alone – it was only when I saw some photographs taken a the dig of the bones in situ and noticed an artefact lying nearby that I began so suspect.”
The artefact in question, a flat-bottomed stone dish that had been broken into 3.14 pieces, was found at the head of the remains, possibly indicating that was burial goods of some sort.
“I saw this stone dish, and something about it looked oddly familiar. At first I just dismissed it as just my imagination being overactive, but I couldn't stop thinking that I knew it from somewhere. It was when I actually saw the dish, which had been among the other artefacts shipped to the university, that I finally pegged – this exact same dish had been among some of the Stony Rapids wall paintings, and I began to wonder if we hadn't discovered Five-Minute Man at long last.”
Many were at first sceptical – many had considered Five-Minute Man to be noting but an aberrant group of homo slouchus rather than a separate species. They were silenced when more artefacts were uncovered that were unmistakably connected to the cave paintings however, and more remains besides, suggesting that slouchus and fiverinius mingled freely. There are also clues that fiverinius was more widespread than just Canada – recent finds in Europe and America suggest that at one point the population was quite high. Why he then disappeared is a mystery, but some have suggested that fiverinius did not disappear completely – it is hypothesized that, due to their intermingling with slouchus, it is not unreasonable to assume that the two bred, and that some traits of this lost species still exist in modern man.
Or, to put it another way – there could be a little of Five-Minute Man in us all.
At first sight the fossilized bones of homo finverinius are not much to look at. The remains, discovered last year in cold and bleak northern Saskech... Sastketchew... in cold and bleak northern Canada at an archaeological dig in the Skadoobiedoobeewop Mountains, were at first thought to be nothing out of the ordinary. It was only when they were examined in more detail, half a year later, at the University of Ottawa, that their true import began to be realised.
Professor Martin Scrungewick is the head of the Archeology department at the U of O, and it was he who first noticed that the some of the remains that had been shipped from northern Canada were a little out of the ordinary. When I met him last week he kindly explained the initial discovery to me.
“We'd just received this crate of finds from the dig in Sas... er, northern Canada, you see, and as far as we knew there wasn't anything special in there. The remains were all supposed to be of homo slouchus, who as you probably don't know, just being a journalist and all, are an ancestor of ours who lived approximately forty-seven million years ago during the Platonic Era. Anyway, as they were being gone over and cataloged, one of the undergrads noticed that there was something a bit funny about one particular set of bones, thinking perhaps that they'd been included by mistake as they obviously weren't slouchus. I could see right away that these were very damn peculiar, though I didn't realise until after some consultation with my colleagues that we might have a whole new ancestor of man on our hands.”
The story of homo finverinius, or Five-Minute Man as he has come to be known, is surprisingly not a new one. To get to the beginning we have to go back to 1927, when a Canadian government-sponsored expedition which was mapping previously unexplored territory (everything north of Winnipeg was blank on maps of the day) came across a cave system near Stony Rapids containing ancient wall paintings. They documented the find, including making a number of sketches of it. They went on their way after a brief few days, and the caves lay silent for another six years until a wandering band of archaeologists, bored with digging up dead lizards and intrigued by the mapping expedition's sketches, went in search of the wall paintings.
They were far more extensive than the original expedition had supposed. Many fascinating things were discovered – a crude representation of what looks surprisingly like a stylized clock, a flame-haired warrior goddess who derived her power from a mysterious black liquid and who could stare her enemies into submission, many pictures of what are unmistakably cedar trees, a man in what looks like a top hat being killed over and over, and several complete sets of what were later determined to be instructions for making pie. There were also, as in many other cave paintings around the world, representations of hunting, but with a difference – they were much more condensed that such paintings normally are, and also, unusually, displayed an odd kind of humour.
Indeed, one of the strangest things about Five-Minute Man was his apparently highly developed (for the era) sense of humour, though their religion was also highly developed, something that is extremely unusual among the peoples of the Platonic Era. Their pantheon of gods, led by the flame-haired goddess, also included a god who wore a symbolistic headpiece (possibly some kind of fertility device) and could talk certain of his enemies to death; a god who fell from his high place and experienced the worst of both worlds, but who was saved; a god who fought in a terrible war in the heavens and was eventually cast into flame; and a god who didn't seem to do anything much except get beaten up. Each of these deities had their own pantheon of lesser beings who represented their own allies and enemies; and on top of this there were a large group of minor gods. The relationships between them all have even yet to be fully discovered, but you get some idea of the complexity of Five-Minute Man's religion.
Of course, the existence of Five-Minute Man remained purely hypothetical for the next seventy-odd years, and the link between the paintings and the unearthed bones might never have been discovered had not anthropologist Felicity Squirrels, who had long been fascinated by the mystery of the lost culture, visited the University of Ottawa a month after the bones had arrived.
“I was visiting a friend of mine at the Archaeology Department and she mentioned that there was a bit of a buzz around because they might have discovered, among a batch of finds that had been sent from a dig in Sask... northern Canada, a previously unknown ancestor of ours, so naturally I wanted to go and see. Of course, there's no way I could have made the link just looking at the bones alone – it was only when I saw some photographs taken a the dig of the bones in situ and noticed an artefact lying nearby that I began so suspect.”
The artefact in question, a flat-bottomed stone dish that had been broken into 3.14 pieces, was found at the head of the remains, possibly indicating that was burial goods of some sort.
“I saw this stone dish, and something about it looked oddly familiar. At first I just dismissed it as just my imagination being overactive, but I couldn't stop thinking that I knew it from somewhere. It was when I actually saw the dish, which had been among the other artefacts shipped to the university, that I finally pegged – this exact same dish had been among some of the Stony Rapids wall paintings, and I began to wonder if we hadn't discovered Five-Minute Man at long last.”
Many were at first sceptical – many had considered Five-Minute Man to be noting but an aberrant group of homo slouchus rather than a separate species. They were silenced when more artefacts were uncovered that were unmistakably connected to the cave paintings however, and more remains besides, suggesting that slouchus and fiverinius mingled freely. There are also clues that fiverinius was more widespread than just Canada – recent finds in Europe and America suggest that at one point the population was quite high. Why he then disappeared is a mystery, but some have suggested that fiverinius did not disappear completely – it is hypothesized that, due to their intermingling with slouchus, it is not unreasonable to assume that the two bred, and that some traits of this lost species still exist in modern man.
Or, to put it another way – there could be a little of Five-Minute Man in us all.