Harvest Tracks: A Ballad of Australopithecus

Connected Facts

The real history behind the joke

Every story on this page is invented. Every link below is not.

1. 01

   Laetoli · Wikipedia — About 3.7 million years ago hominins walked across damp volcanic ash at Laetoli in northern Tanzania, leaving a 24-metre trackway that rain then cemented into tuff. Mary Leakey's team excavated it in the late 1970s; the prints show their makers were fully bipedal roughly a million years before the earliest known stone tools.

2. 02

   Australopithecus · Wikipedia — The genus lived in Africa from roughly 4.3 to 1.9 million years ago, usually 1.2 to 1.4 m tall with a brain about 35 percent the size of a modern human's. Their diet ran to fruit, vegetables and tubers, so the gathering in the ballad is the one part that is not anachronistic.

3. 03

   Australopithecus afarensis · Wikipedia — The species most often proposed as the maker of the Laetoli prints, living 3.9 to 2.9 million years ago. The skeleton known as Lucy, found in 1974, stood about 105 cm. Carbon isotope work on teeth shows the diet varied by habitat, forest dwellers favouring one class of plants and grassland dwellers another.

4. 04

   Wagonway · Wikipedia — The earliest known track-guided transport is the Diolkos, a grooved limestone trackway that carried boats across the Isthmus of Corinth from around 600 BC. Wooden wagonways come later still, illustrated by German miners in 1556 — which puts a savanna tramway some 3.7 million years ahead of schedule.

5. 05

   Basket weaving · Wikipedia — Baskets are made of perishable stuff and seldom survive: the oldest known examples are only 10,000 to 12,000 years old. Archaeologists more often recover the weave as an imprint pressed into fired clay than the basket itself.