J.T. McDaniel's blog

Somewhat Improbable

Last night (or, to be more precise, early this morning) I found myself watching Mistress of the Apes. The plot is rather silly. Beautiful young anthropologist in labor falls victim to crazed druggies raiding the hospital for drugs and the baby is stillborn. Meanwhile, her husband has gone missing in the Congo. An expedition is organized, they tangle with poachers, the rich friend organizing everything turns out to be the chief villain (which, considering he spends the lead-up to his revelation as the heavy trying to jump every female he encounters, with the notable exception of his wife, and shooting everything in sight, shouldn't be that surprising), and the anthropologist discovers a tribe of Homo habilis living in the remote jungle, befriends them, and ends up knocked up by one of them. Happy endings all around, and weirdness predominates. The lead, Jenny Neumann, never appears in that outfit, by the way. The Boris Vallejo poster art does do a fairly good job of depicting the "ape-men."

So much for the movie. It's typical late 1970's semi-exploitation, with acting ranging from fairly good to awful, and a lot of violence and a little nudity. What I have a problem with is the premise. Homo habilis lived about a million and half to two million years ago. The plot of this movie has at least a few of them living now (or, in 1979, anyway). 

Now, these "ape-men" do not, in fact, look that much like what any scientific reconstruction of actual Homo habilis skulls would seem to suggest. The genuine article bore nearly as strong a resemblance to chimps as to modern humans, though the two lines had split five or six million years earlier. They were tool users—that's where the scientific name, which translates as "handy man"—comes from. But they were more ape-like in general appearance, including having shorter legs in proportion to their bodies.

The actors playing the ape-men in the movie, of course, look like physically well-developed modern men wearing a lot of prosthetic makeup. They're also at least a foot too tall. What they most strongly resemble, and what would have made more sense in the context, are Neanderthals. Neanderthals became extinct only in the last twenty to fifty thousand years. Recently enough that surviving pockets would be at least within the realm of possibility.

What would a surviving band of Homo habilis look like if they had survived into the modern period? They might look like us, because, of course, from an evolutionary standpoint they are probably what we evolved from. It's rather silly to presume that an isolated band would simply stop evolving. They also might look significantly different. Just because certain features were selected for once, doesn't mean it would happen again.

Another problem pops up towards the end of the movie. The anthropologist, having mated with one of the ape-men, becomes pregnant. Presented with this, it's hard not to wonder if this would even be possible. While Homo sapiens and Homo habilis belong to the same genus, we are different species, separated by more than a million years of evolution. Mating would certainly be possible—you can physically mate with anything that has compatible genitalia, as the occasional bestiality prosecution makes clear—but the likelihood of producing viable offspring would be extremely low, and the likelihood of producing fertile offspring even lower. You might get something like a mule, the offspring of a mare and a donkey, having some characteristics of both, but completely incapable of reproducing. The most likely outcome, though, would be no pregnancy at all. 

Just because Homo habilis, so far as we can tell, evolved into us, that doesn't mean an isolated population would do the same thing. A physical resemblance would be fairly likely. Genetic compatibility is another thing entirely. This would not, after all, be a modern human trying to mate with an original Homo habilis, but of a modern human trying to mate with an ancestral species that had, itself, undergone over a million years of further evolution.

If this group had somehow not evolved, it's likely the initial meeting with the pretty young anthropologist would have had a different outcome, most probably involving her ending up as the entree. The band would have just identified her as some unrelated primate species, like a chimp or gorilla, and added her to the menu. It's not technically cannibalism if it's a different species. Modern humans eat chimpanzees from time to time, which is unfortunate for both species, as this is probably how HIV jumped the chimp/human barrier. 

I can see some religious types liking this movie because it implies that species are stable, and evolution doesn't occur. They'd likely dislike it because of the nudity, of course. They'd also dislike it because it suggests that the world is somewhere around its actual age, and not the 6,000 or so years that creationists delude themselves into believing. 

Looking to more current entertainment, the audiobook version of Returning was released today. The audio version is narrated by British actress Bridget Thomas. I wanted a woman for this book, given the predominance of women among the most important characters (captain, navigating officer, Marine detachment commander, Marine company commander, and so forth). This unabridged reading runs just under eight hours.

As of now, the audio version is available at Audible.com and Amazon.com. And, of course, if you prefer to read it yourself, you can find it on Amazon in both print and Kindle editions.

Were Callaaites the Original Amazons?

Callaaites don't have family names. Like modern Icelanders, their surnames are derived from a parent's given name. The difference is that, for the most part, Icelandic and old Scandinavian names were patronymics, while Callaaite names were matronymics. So Warrior's navigator in Returning, Lieutenant Marina Fehmadaatin, could equally be styled in English as Marina, Fehma's Daughter.

Marina was a 19-year-old sub lieutenant, only recently graduated from the Imperial Naval College, when she volunteered to join the starship Warrior as navigating officer. When the ship returned to earth 15 years later (by ship time, or 86,985 years in real time), she was 34, and had been a lieutenant for several years.

A beautiful, blue-eyed blond, there was something about Marina that tended to intimidate modern men. Even 2126 men who had never heard of Callaa, and had no idea that for almost a thousand years its women had cultivated a reputation as the most deadly warriors in the pre-Imperial world. Even unarmed, Marina was more dangerous than most people would be with a gun.

Just as the destruction of Arzucalda by Earth's deorbited second moon is suggested as a possible source for the Atlantis legends, so Callaa seems a possible source for later Amazon stories.

For all that, Marina wasn't particularly ferocious in ordinary life. When you're not even a little intimidated by anyone, you can put up with a lot more from them. Chihuahuas are afraid of everything and tend to fight back even when they're not really in danger. Great Danes fear very little, and it usually takes a lot to provoke them, but if you do the results can be devastating.

Marina is a widow, because her husband remained at home when Warrior took off into space. He died sometime during the first jump, when the ship travelled some 200 light years. In the process, the people aboard the ship aged a few seconds, while the universe aged 200 years.

One of the more unique things about Returning is this concept of speed-of-light travel. Warrior, and the other two ships of her class, travel at about .9999 light speed when they're in jumpspace. Outside the temporal bubble where the ship is travelling, time continues normally.

This has an odd effect when the ship interacts with colonial worlds. With each visit, Warrior becomes more archaic, her systems more ancient, her technology more out of date. When Surgeon Commander Vordik joins the ship during a call on his native New Barzak, the medical technology he brings with him is literally millennia more advanced than what the ship started out with only, to her crew, a decade earlier. Her return to Earth is one of the few times Warrior encounters a human civilisation less advanced than her own. 

Of course, other than Earth, any human civilisation Warrior encounters is descended from colonists she brought to that planet centuries before. So, while Warrior is travelling forward in time in prodigious leaps, those colonies continue to advance scientifically and technologically at the usual rate, rapidly putting them well ahead of their parent culture as represented by the starship's crew.

I've had a lot of time to think about the Gehunite civilisation. As the date on the map indicates, I first came up with the culture in the mid-1970s, for an ultimately never published novel called Alura. If I still had it, I'd publish it now, but the manuscript was lost years ago. It's possible that the California publisher that wanted to do it way back then kept a copy, but they've been out of business for many years now, and I can't remember the publisher's name.

Alura was swords and sorcery. Returning is science fiction. They're connected by the Gehunite Empire, which starts as a world where magic exists and ends as a world where science has taken over. The span between the two novels is roughly 525 years of Gehunite history. Long enough for the magic to fade away, and humanity to go from riding animals to exploring deep space.

You'll find Returning available at Amazon.com, in both Kindle and trade paperback editions. Be one of those people who gets interested early, so you can feel superior to the lazy chaps who waited until the movie to notice there was a book.

 

How do you Kill a Brainless Zombie?

This came up the other day during a rehearsal break. How do you kill a zombie? You take a shotgun and blow its brains out. What happens if you're attacked by a zombie? You become a zombie. What's the first thing a zombie does when it kills a victim? It eats the victim's brain.

So maybe the first zombie had a brain, but the new victim-zombie is brainless, because the first zombie ate it. Yet the new zombie is still staggering around, trying to kill more humans and eat their brains. You're developing generations of victim zombies here who have no brains to blow out. So how do you kill them?

Or do you only turn into a zombie if the first zombie gets distracted and doesn't eat your brain after all? Maybe the fully brain-eaten get to stay dead? Oh, the possibilities!

Okay, if the prelude to a zombie outbreak is a naked Linnea Quigley dancing in a cemetery, you might not bother with a detailed plot analysis. In fact, when it comes to horror movies in general, you probably don't want to worry too much about plausibility, whether it contains a naked Linnea or not.

For instance, does anyone think a nebbish like Seymour was really able to breed that plant? Or that anyone who looked like Jackie Joseph would want to date him, even if he did? And should we speculate as to whether Dick Miller's peculiar diet in the same film was a sly pun on Jean Kerr's 1957 book? 

Do not over-analyse 'B' movies. 

But still, just how do you kill a brainless zombie? The world needs to know these things, just in case.