>The reason why it makes no impact is that the microwear studies of ancient
>fossil teeth show a consistent pattern of having eaten some percentage of
>meat in the diet across successive species in the hominid line over a
>period of roughly 3 million years, from australopithecus to the present. If
>aliens were to land on the planet and find microwear evidence for
>cheeseburgers, the time span of the behavior would--at this point--have
>only lasted since, what, 1800 or 1900 or 1950(?), or whenever the heck it
>was the recipe for cheeseburgers might have been invented. If on this basis
>they projected cheeseburger adaptation it seems to me they would be rather
>unintelligent aliens not worthy of interstellar travel in the first place.

Whoops, surely I will be attacked here for not stating my implied
assumption that if aliens were only looking at one data point of fossil
teeth microwear from the timespan 1950-2000 or so, it would be under
*those* circumstances they were unintelligent to assume adaptation to
cheeseburgers. (Man am I cracking up here, or what?... :) )

However (this makes me cackle even more), if they happened to find
cheeseburger microwear throughout the timespan of the year 1950 to the year
501950 (500,000 years hence as proposed in the original post), *then* yer
darn tootin' they would probably be justified in assuming a planet composed
of an all-star team of Ronald McDonalds wearing Golden Arches jerseys
thriving on cheeseburgers and dunking basketballs in their Air Jordans.

What??! Surely you don't think those aliens would miss the point of all
those Nike shoes they would find in the same geological strata as the
fossil teeth, dooya? Look, no feet, ma! Our rear pod-appendages evolved
into Nikes. :)

--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]> Wichita, KS