Nights on the African savanna can be a savage and dangerous place even today. During the time of our australopithecine ancestors it was far more dangerous then it is now. It is hard to see how a small and defenseless animal like an australopithecine could survive it on the ground. It has often been said that the australopithecines, with their feet and legs well adapted to bipedalism, could not climb trees very well, and would have a very hard time spending an entire night in a tree hanging on with just its hands. Females with young would be especially vulnerable. Other explanations of how they spent the night (such as brush fences) have their own problems. But what if they had "help" to stay in the trees?

I have already demonstrated how australopithecines could have met their food needs by use of the cat and how they could have used cats for defense, now I will show how they could have used cats for night time shelter.

As anyone who has ever petted a cat during dry weather (like that on the African savanna) knows, cat fur has the potential for producing enormous amounts of static electricity. Rub a child's balloon on a cat and it will stick to the ceiling, sometimes for days. I purpose that australopithecines used this static producing property of cats to help them spend the nights safely in the trees, out of the reach of the many large carnivores that roamed the African savanna. If an australopithecine rubbed itself briskly with one or more cats, it might be able to build up a large enough electro-static charge for it to stick to the branches of the tree just like the balloon sticks to the ceiling. It's possible they had to wait for the coming of the morning dew to discharge the static charge and allow the australopithecines to drop to the ground. More likely they discharged themselves by urinating - a stream of urine is a good conductor. You may test this by peeing on an electric fence. This may explain why humans have such a disproportional large penis, the largest penis of any primate. The males would use the better aim their long penis gave them to "shoot down" the females and young.

The australopithecines may not have needed to rub the cats against their bodies themselves, but that the cats did it automatically. A few hundred generations of selective breeding of cats could easily have produced this behavior and is a wink of an eye in evolutionary terms. Millions of years later, modern cats still show vestiges of this behavior.

Experimental proof:

I attempted to duplicate the australopithecine's static cling on a test subject (myself), however at over 100 Kg, the test subject was far heavier then an australopithecine and not quite as hairy as they are generally believed to have been. Also only two cats were available for the experiment and they were not at all cooperative. For these reasons the experiment failed. There was a weight loss of several tens of grams noted, but as this was due to blood loss, it was not considered pertinent to the experiment. However, valuable data was gathered on the use of cats as weapons, so the experiment was not a total loss.

Perhaps somebody else would like to try the experiment. If anyone out there has access to a young chimpanzee of a weight of 45 Kg or less and a large number of cats, just rub the chimp briskly with the cats until the chimp sticks to the ceiling. In order to get it back down, do what an australopithecine would do and piss on it. Just make sure the chimp does not have a full bladder during the test or you may find the experiment over before it starts.

Copyright © Lorenzo L. Love
August 8, 1998