The Story of Tall One
The title of this Blog refers to the first of seven stories in my book, The Blessing Stone. Tall One was a female human who lived a hundred thousand years ago on the African savannah. Not quite modern man, yet also not still brutish ape, Tall One symbolizes the transition of Homo sapiens from the animal kingdom to the unique human one. How would such an individual think and act? I wondered. What would her thoughts be? Her dreams? How about her emotions? And how big a part would her basic genetic structure play in her development into Homo sapiens ("Man the Wise")?
To do research for this story, I turned to current books on anthropology, archaeology, and pre-history. I read about the most recent finds of human fossils, the latest of the Leakey doings in Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. And then I recalled a book that wasn't the "latest" or "current" and yet which had so impressed me years ago, when it first came out to best-sellerdom, that I decided to dig it out and read it again. I would like to recommend that book now, to readers who enjoyed The Blessing Stone and who would like to know more about what inspired me to write the story of Tall One.
I am referring to the now-classic African Genesis by Robert Ardrey (1961, Dell Publishing Co.). Ardrey, an American playwright, toured Africa in the early 1960s, a time when astonishing fossil discoveries were being made, and he met with the prominent paleontologists, archaeologists and historians of the day. Out of that inquiry, Ardrey arrived at the conclusion that we today are still very closely linked to our primeval ancestors of a hundred thousand years ago. "Man is a fraction of the animal world," Ardrey wrote. "And if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march."
This book is poetry! Here is how it begins: "Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born. The home of our fathers was that African highland reaching north from the Cape to the Lakes of the Nile. Here we came about - slowly, ever so slowly - on a sky-swept savannah glowing with menace."
And here is how the book ends: "Australopithecus africanus lies buried not in limey caves, but in my heart and your heart, and in the black man's down the street …. We are Cain's children, all of us."
For anyone thirsting to know more about human origins, to perhaps understand how I created Tall One and her world, you can do no better than to read African Genesis.
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