If A Big Chimp Could Use Tools 3 Million Years Ago, Why Is My Tap Still Leaking? Demands Public

It's upstairs, first door on the left

The public has reacted with fury to the news that ancient hominids were able to use tools, demanding to know why, after 3.2 million years of evolution, modern tradesmen are incapable of operating a spanner.

Bones with clear cut marks made by primitive stone tools were unearthed by palaeontologists working in Ethiopia, pushing back the earliest known date for tool use by 800,000 years. The only species known to have inhabited the Dikka region so long ago is Australopithecus afarensis, a distant ancestor of modern homo sapiens resembling an orang-utan.

Scientists are, however, at a loss to explain precisely when modern man lost the ability to use simple tools. Some estimate that the process began as far back as the mid-20th century, while others put the date as recently as 6th May 2009, when the National Apprenticeship Service was launched after the government decided that six weeks was plenty of time in which to learn everything there was to know about being a skilled gas fitter.

“Hello, is that Paignton Zoo?” commented a typical homeowner this afternoon. “I’d like to book one of your gibbons to come and mastic my bathroom next Monday.”

Fish May Prove Existence of God

A German research team from Tübingen University has discovered a fish that uses mirrors in its eyes to see in two directions at once.

Uniquely among vertebrates, the deep-sea spookfish has mirrors within its eyes instead of lenses, so that it can look upwards and downwards simultaneously. Although the spookfish was first discovered 120 years ago, Professor Hans-Joachim Wagner's team are the first to capture a specimen alive.

"This unlikely miracle fish surely proves that God exists," proclaimed a Christian fundamentalist taxi. However, a passing bus contended that it was simply another example of how problems are solved by natural selection through evolutionary forces.

Teachers Keen To Teach Any Old Rubbish

One in three UK schoolteachers supports the teaching of mumbo-jumbo in science lessons, according to a survey published today.

The Ipsos Mori survey also shows that 65% of primary and secondary school science teachers still say there is no place in their lessons for creationism - the flimsy, pick-and-mix argument that says that the evolution of the human eye is far too complicated for its adherents (including President Bush) to understand, and therefore cannot have come about by natural processes, despite the fact that the 26 other perfectly good types of eye have somehow managed it.

"Creationism, as an alternative to the evolution of species, has long been thoroughly discredited by rigorous analysis of data," explained Professor Chris Higgins, vice-chancellor of Durham University. "One might as well teach astrology, flat earthism, alchemy or a geocentric universe."

Many teachers seized on Professor Higgins' additional suggestions with enthusiasm, however, saying that they would happily teach anything that soothed the blind prejudices of their students and did not conflict with parental indoctrination.

However, the survey continues to attract criticism from prominent atheists in the scientific community.

"Any reasonable person with the slightest aptitude for rational thought will surely want to remove these thick-headed idiot teachers immediately - and not just from the classroom, but from the gene pool of the human race," commented popular TV God-baiter Richard Dawkins, through clenched teeth. "My message to these so-called educators is: read a book, for fuck's sake - preferably one of mine, available in all good bookshops."

"But not SPCK bookshops, obviously," he added, after pausing to hurl abuse at a visiting neighbour who wished him a Merry Christmas.