It is strange, but exceedingly convenient, that human beings don’t have tails. Most animals have tails, even monkeys. Imagine how happy we would be if children could swing from the trees in the school playground. The inconvenience of course would be designing clothes to cater for the tail.
Extra-terrestrial aliens have tails. Well, not all of them, but many of them do. Some dock their tails not unlike we dock lambs.
None of this of course has anything to do with what I started to tell you about what my grandmother said. She said human beings lost their tails when they used it to fish through the ice. They would make a hole in the ice (in a lake of course) and sit on it with their tail poking through until they caught a fish. Then they would stand up and the fish would be food for the whole family.
As the lakes became more and more fished out, the tails had to stay in the icy water for longer and longer periods. Eventually things iced over and the only way to stand was to yank the tail off. Fishless of course. And that is why today humans are tail-less.
Those in the know, and there are more of you than you might think, could perhaps query as to why we follow Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in this matter and not Charles Darwin. Lamarck says that traits acquired by parents can be inherited by their children. These days it is rubbished, but how else can we explain the lack of tails other than my grandmother’s explanation? Tail-less human beings are proof that Lamarck was right after all. And that is the end of my tail.
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