Our great, great grand daddy was a Handyman. Yep, you, me and just about everybody else around today.
I am talking grand OLD daddy Handyman.
Before I go any further, we all know a Handyman or two. And yes, there are plenty of Handywomen as well. On occasion… I can be pretty handy, actually.
The first appearance of the word shows up in about 1872. Of course, we all know that handy means…. convenient to handle or use… or skillful. So it makes sense to call someone a Handyman when they are adept at fixing everything from the leaky kitchen faucet to the the broken door lock.
But back to grand pappy.
Here is the deal. On today’s date (as I write) November 2… some 55 years ago…. a young lady named Mary Leaky made quite a discovery.
She was digging around in the dirt at a little place called Olduvai Gorge, which is in Tanzania.
Mary and her dirt-scooping-team discovered the first fossils of Homo habilis, an early human ancestor.
Call him Homer if you want…. but Homo habilis is thought to be one of the earliest species to make stone tools. Old Grandpa Homer lived between 1.4 and 2.3 million years ago.
Mary Leakey called him Homo Halibis because it means Handyman… in honor of his mad-skills with tools.
And it is a bit ironic that her last name was Leakey. She was quite the paleoanthropologist. A British woman. It probably sounded neat when she said…. “Start digging boys.”
But. I digress, dang it.
At any rate, in 1960 on this date, Mary Leakey found some bones. Handyman Bones for 2 million years ago.
The saddest part of the story is this:
You all have to muddle through all this, to the end…. as a result of my being so tired I can barely see straight. And this was all I could come up with in this state of sheer depletion
… an old bag of bones from Tanzania.