JAMES STEIMLE

Can you imagine how much the world would change if a caveman turned up, say over that hill over there?

 

It’s happened before, things like that.

 

We think the dinosaurs are dead.  We find their bones and then hear the odd story about strange animals found in China or wherever, and we just write it off.

 

In the last century, a saber tooth tiger was discovered.  But when the evidence is stolen by greedy and what I suspect to be exceedingly wealthy collectors, scientists are forced to write off the discovery as a fraud.  After all, where’s the proof?

 

Or are they?

 

While working on my History degree some fifteen years ago, I heard National Public Radio broadcast the shocking discovery of Australopithecus Anamensis.  Magazines to which I subscribed before the millennium affirmed the discovery and stated that with the discovery of this particular kind of ancient man, “We no longer have a clue about the cradle of life.”  At the same time—even while I was listening to the radio—other scientists refused to believe that this missing link could exist.  It ruined everything in the chain because it was the wrong link in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It cracked the going theory right across the belly.

 

And then … everything was set aside.  Easier to keep the history and anthropology books in their current order than to alter and reprint the literature.

 

So Australopithecus Anamensis has been left to watch the march of man, from the sidelines.

 

I have no problem with this.  Because I simply adore fiction.  I think we all do.

 

In the nineteenth century, a female anthropologist discovered something even better.  Note: I said nineteenth century and female anthropologist.  The incongruent definition, back in those days when men ruled the world of higher education, proved to be the first incentive to sweep this find under the proverbial rug.  The second had to do with what happened to the discovery.

 

While the event has been put on a pedestal beside the fiction writings of H.G. Wells, I have produced a dramatized record of this anthropologist’s account and given it a title based on the English translation of the Inuit name of the race specified:  The Ghost People.

 

But I have so many other things I could tell you.

 

We are surrounded, after all, by stories.

 

And what, after all, is truth?

 

 

"Pearl of Great Price" by James Steimle in