Anthropithecus Erectus Poem by gershon hepner

The time before the mythic is
the time when anthropithecus
roamed upright, walking on his legs
except when he was having sex.
Then Ulysses from Ithaca
by Homer was made mythicker,
and early primates misbegotten,
like anthropithecus, forgotten.

A modern era now has started
and by this poet has been charted,
this poem acting as prospectus
for modern man who is erectus
once he comes out of infant diapers,
becoming, with Cialis, priapus,
erect and monolithic as
a walking anthropithecus.

Moral:

Upright we now love to walk,
man-apes, though we sometimes balk
when we can’t stand up with a wood,
as upright as we wish we could.

Richard Bernstein reviews “Java Man: How Two Geologists’ Dramatic Discoveries Changed Our Understanding of the Evolutionary Path to Modern Humans, ” by Carl C. Swisher III, Garniss H. Curtis and Roger Lewin (Scribner) in “Aliens on Earth: We Used to Call Them Ancestors, ” NYT, January 10,2000. The authors relate how Eugene Dubois in the Solo River in Java in 1892 discovered a fossil that is now believed to be 1.8 million years old. Dubois called this fossil of Java Man Anthropithecus erectus or upright man-ape, noting that it “stood upright and moved like a human”. This creature was later called Homo erectus and is similar to fossils later discovered in China and Africa. Interestingly enough, skulls of Java man found in Ngandong in central Java are only 50,000 years old, implying that Java man survived for nearly 2 million years, perhaps until 27,000 years ago, a separate species to Homo sapiens which died out after Homo sapiens began to thrive.

1/11/01