Research suggests ‘The Circle Game’ originated with early man
Anthropologists at Ohio State University have published a controversial paper in American Anthropologist positing early man as the creator of “the circle game,” causing wide-reaching implications to ripple throughout the scientific community.
The circle game is a well-known prank played by adolescents wherein the prankster forms an “OK” symbol with their hand pressed to their leg below the waist. If someone else looks at the circle, the prankster is allowed to punch them. The bane of teachers and nerds the world over, the circle game has long been thought to rest among the wedgie, flat tire, swirlie, Indian burn, wet willy, and noogie as an invention of modern schoolchildren bent on playing out their anti-authority frustrations and establishing their own pecking order. But newfound evidence suggests it may be far older.
A 2016 excursion funded by the NSF took OSU doctorate students and a team of paleontologists to Ethiopia after a group of tourists stumbled upon some interesting artifacts in the horn of Africa. There, the scientists discovered three fossilized hominids with one hand each displaying a gesture which clearly resembled that of the circle game. What’s more, these ancient mummies were found near a network of caves which included ancient paintings of human-like figures making “OK” gestures at all the animals, and then proceeding to hunt them.
The OSU students suggest that the circle game came about as early humans discovered they alone had opposable thumbs and realized their inherent superiority over all other creatures. Like a taunt or war cry, a bird spreading its wings, a bear on its hind legs, the thumb opposed to the forefinger in a circle gesture was a display of physical superiority. Peer review and social media buzz led to speculation that the circle game was indeed the very origin of human conceit and began millennia of the human-animal schism in cultural consciousness, or that it inspired the civilization-enabling wheel.
The remains of these ancient humans were carefully extracted and the paintings painstakingly documented for study at the Ethiopian Science and Technology Information Center. Preliminary indications are that these people belonged to a yet-unnamed branch of our genetic lineage. The peanut gallery has suggested Homy McHomoface and Homo Trollus as the official designation of these historic finds.
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