Let us not be too hard on the Great Apes.

Maybe Jane Goodall has the right idea.

And Diane Fosse paid a high price for the realization

that snoozing in the high grass, munching free fruit

while playing with the kids and grooming a very close friend or two

is not a bad way to live a life!

And what about the Neanderthals?

Warm in their caves, toasting chunks of mammoth

and what ever passed for prehistoric marshmallows

while listening in focused rapture

to a wandering shamanic story teller share grunted tales

(from her admittedly slender portfolio)

about their not too distant past ,

handed down to them after merely a few generations of ancestors,

(who were probably the originators

of the roots-of the myths- of the fables

we hear on Sunday morning or in Temple from the Rabbi on Sabbath

as golden gems plucked from Torah and out of the mouth of Jesus.

All brilliant in their simplicity!

Then they past their evolutionary process on down to us Sapiens.

And we took it

and ran,

forgetting that ignorance of the Periodic Table

does not mean, ipso-facto, a lack of innate intelligence

about what it takes to make a good fire in a cozy cave

or how the periodic alignment of all the planets

connected or even led to a full harvest in the Autumn…

Where do we Homo-Sapiens get off demeaning the intellect of gorillas

or the brilliance of cave-dwellers?

How has being a part of Homo-Atomic-Us

been working out for us,

lately,

Hiroshima and Nagasaki in our rear-view mirror

and the current threat of some other countries nuclear-stock-pile

causing another world war just up the road…?

And how will the Big Jump to Homo-Superflous

work out for us when Evolution

reaches the inevitable conclusion

that there is no such thing as Intelligence that is Artificial?

And that any man-made-AI- system can operate

very nicely, thank you very much

without bumbling and incompetent humanity!

Seems to me

a return to the fire side,

coddled by GrandMa

while Dad and Ma and GrandPa

dance among the sparks

like Kevin Costner and Two-Socks

is very much a consummation

devoutly to be wished?

(And very likely all we’ll ever get!)