A Child Of Atom

Ladies and Gentlemen! It's time for my new favorite game: Why The Graphic Designer Should Have Been Fired!

Today we have a subway ad for the Nova special "Becoming Human," a three part Nova series on human evolution.

The ad jokes that you can become human in "6 million simple steps" and lays out the first few:

1) Get out of tree
2) Grow big brain
3) Scratch vigorously
4) Shed
5) Flee animals
6) Chase animals
7) Make tools
8) Make fire
9) Make small talk... there are one or two others that are visible on other versions of the ad.

So what do we see? First there are some gross over-simplifications, like step 2. Whether we grew larger brains after leaving the trees, or as a part of being better able to move in trees is part of a huge debate. But we can leave that aside as just being advertising, I'm sure the actual Nova episodes go into more detail. Then there is the odd ordering of the steps... is shedding of body hair so important that it needs to be step 3? And did we really shed it before we discovered fire and tools? Our cousins the Neanderthal used tools, but we generally consider them to still be fairly hairy and apelike. But again... artistic license to tell a story quickly and easily in an ad.

What I really object to are the illustrations that accompany steps 5 through 7:

Flee animals... chase animals... make tools.

A pretty simple concept, right?

So why then does the human in step 6 already HAVE a spear? Is a spear not a tool? I mean... it's only 10 steps... you'd think you could get them in a fairly appropriate order... right?

So what do you think? Fire the graphic designer, or no?

(And for the record, yes... this is the type pf thing that I think about when the train is too crowded to draw...)