h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You used my go-away birdie! Heh heh I saw a couple of them in the garden today.

Let me post this quickly before the power goes out again. I think the visual footage here is very valuable in itself. As for the commentary ... well it was the 1930's! I wonder what folks will think of our current-day documentaries in 2090. But anyways, the thing with the 'primitive' lifestyle is that it is much less invasive ... Bushmen can live in the wild environment without altering or destroying it and they need far less than we do for keeping alive.

We have a Northern Sotho museum a few miles out of town. It is at the site of a settlement from, I think, the seventeenth century. They keep the skills alive there of, as one of the employees put it to me, 'living without money'. I think that is something worth keeping alive ... even just the idea of it! Would you be interested in an article or two about the museum perhaps?

Oh and I wanted to say ... warthogs are very modern and very advanced and specialized pigs! They and domestic pigs share a common ancestor that lived over five million years ago, but those pigs, whatever they were, are not around any more.

Oh and I felt sorry for those lions ... and of course the Masai have nothing to do with the Bushmen or the Kalahari, they live thousands of miles away!

I was hoping you'd set the record straight on all this, Willem. I knew you'd know exactly what you were looking at.

Boy, that would be great - the museum idea, I mean.

I agree with that - I admire these moneyless cultures (after all, some of my nearer ancestors lived in one), and I thought the pictures alone were worth putting up with the voiceover.

I thought the rare comment was if you see a rhino in the water it is a hippopotamus, wow, these narrators were anything but zooloogists--proably dumb social sciences if they were college educated at all.

Hi Elektra, you might like these pics:

http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/images/Javan-rhino-swimming_i1330137795.php?type=tax_images&taxon=7&sort_order=desc&sort_key=year

Second picture on link below:

http://www.thelookmachine.com/weblog/2005/01/pictures-of-nepal.html

Second picture below as well:

http://www.jacquetta.net/2008/10/

http://www.arkive.org/sumatran-rhinoceros/dicerorhinus-sumatrensis/image-G112914.html

http://www.fanpop.com/spots/rhinos/images/17768740/title/black-rhino-running-through-water-photo

Please tell me if all of those work!

Over here there is a story that the white rhino is the only mammal that can't swim, because of not being able to raise its head high enough to have its nostrils above the water when its body is submerged. I'm not sure if that is true, but I've never seen a white rhino swimming in open water and cannot find pictures of them swimming either. The pic above is 'in water' so techincally correct but not actually swimming.

There used to be some very hippo-like rhinos around, such as the Chilotherium I illustrated for Colours of Wildlife.

But hippos are actually very, very distantly related to rhinos. Hippose are more closely related to whales than to rhinos, and rhinos are more closely related to horses than to hippos.

Thanks, Willem they all worked and thanks for the taxonomic history of the critters as well.