"
Pithecanthropus Erectus."
Pithecanthropus Erectus.
Charles Mingus -
Pithecanthropus Erectus (Atlantic Masters 81227 3616-2) Roland Kirk - The Inflated Tear (Atlantic Masters 81227 3614-2) Art Blakey & Thelonious Monk - Jazz Messengers (Atlantic Masters 81227 3607-2) Lee Konitz - Inside Hi-Fi (Atlantic Masters 81227 3615-2) The Modern Jazz Quartet - Blues On Bach (Atlantic Masters 81227 3629-2) Ornette Coleman - Change Of The Century (Atlantic Masters 81227 3608-2) Airto Moreira - I'm Fine, How Are You?
In the rollicking postwar musical and film On the Town, recently revived on Broadway, a sex-crazed debutante "anthropology student" character throws herself at one of the sailors on leave because he "exactly resembles
Pithecanthropus erectus, a man extinct since six million BC." The television series 90210 had a sluttish "feminist anthropologist" character, and Sarah Jessica Parker, in Sex and the City, calls herself a "sexual anthropologist." The way things seem to be going, we might want to specify another media Halloween costume for the feminist anthropologist: bustier and fishnets.
She created Pork Pie Hat, a duet for herself and Medler;
Pithecanthropus Erectus, a solo for her; and Jump, Monk (Charles Mingus), a large-scale piece for Medler's North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble.
Consider the picture of
Pithecanthropus alalus shown in Figure 1.
(
Pithecanthropus, by the way, is probably the only scientific name given to an animal before it was discovered.
Looking at those charts which show how humans evolved from a chain of hunched and swarthy hominids -- australopithecus,
pithecanthropus, neanderthaler and so on -- our path follows a line of increasing uprightness, as if seeking out the posture of the walker.