The colony has existed for seventeen Rustumite years, ten Terrestrial. Joshua Coffin and Teresa Zeleny are married and have five children, including Danny, the adopted exogene. The Svobodas have four, including one exogene, and their daughter, Jocelyn, is engaged to Colin Lochaber. Children have died in events like the Year of Sickness and the Peace Day blizzard. Natural selection generates a new human race. The new generation accepts the large, bright, orange sun, its slow descent and the wan blue sky and knows Earth as a history lesson and Sol as one star in the night sky. Jan Svoboda overhears children's whispers in the thick High American air. Details of daily life are forever different.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Interesting, meaning children born on Rustum won't HEAR as keenly as those of the colonists who had been born on Earth?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: only slightly. Human ears spent millions of years (unintentional rhyme!) evolving for our atmosphere; the children of the settlers will be
For that matter, it varies on earth -- I live at 7500 feet and there are noticeable effects when I go to sea level. Everything is slightly louder, and I'm sleepy for days.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That does make sense, the hearing of the colonists on Rustum adjusting to the thicker atmosphere over several generations.
Ad astra! Sean
And evolution is a kludgy process.
Eg., we have binocular vision; we evolved it to judge distances accurately when swinging from branch to branch.
But when our remote ancestors became bipeds, it turned out to be very useful for hunting game -- which is why carnivores evolved it.
Herbivores commonly have side-mounted eyes to see more of their surroundings, eg., things that want to eat them sneaking up.
But we evolved sensitive -color- vision to discriminate among fruits, which our tree-dwelling ancestors ate a lot of.
We kept that when we became apex predators.
Did our prehuman ancestors go into trees as quadrupeds, develop opposable thumbs for grasping branches and come out of the trees as bipeds?
So I thought but I have been told that the evidence suggests that bipedalism preceded opposable thumbs.
Paul: it's not an either-or. We developed grasping appendages on both sets of limbs while arboreal; then they gradually adapted to walking on the ground.
Australopithecus had opposable thumbs... but not as fully opposable or as strong and dexterous as human thumbs.
Likewise, they were bipedal, but their foot and hip structure wasn't as well-developed for purely ground-walking life as ours.
The modern body plan was fully in place by homo erectus, about 2m years ago.
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