The other day I was speaking with a friend…she wasn’t my friend, mind you; she seemed to have better taste than that.  Still, she struck me as being a very nice person who has actual friends.  Anyway, she was telling me about a place she visited in Nebraska.  Yes, there are places to visit in Nebraska…  there’s no place NEXT to them, but there are places to visit. 

            This particular place was a historical site at which had been found the fossilized remains of prehistoric camels.

            “Hey!” you’re thinking at this article, “there are no camels in North America… or even Nebraska!”

            You’re right, and that’s exactly my point.  Consider the significance of the fact.  This means there were people on this continent long before anyone thought there were – and they had ZOO’s!  Imagine.  A prehistoric people in America with a thirst for knowledge, a desire for culture and the need for someplace to take their kids on Saturday afternoon.  And since these camels are from Africa or the Middle East or some continent which has already fallen into some ocean or other, it means these people had intercontinental commerce and consequently, intercontinental travel and probably a trade deficit, but that’s not the point of this article.  I mean, think about it.  They had to get the camels over here somehow and they couldn’t just slap a FED-EX sticker on them and send them off.  This was way before the first cargo ships (which were made of gopher wood and measured in cubits…I think).   

            To accomplish this monumental task these early zoologists enlisted the aid of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom’s Marlin Perkins, who was a young man at that time.  Since they didn’t have a written language at that time, Marlin was known by an odd geometric symbol, which meant “the wildlife biologist who will later be known as Marlin Perkins.”  What Marlin did was travel to the Middle East, which was then the Southwest because you had to approach it from the Northeast.  And even though they crossed what is now the International Date Line, it hadn’t really developed into an actual line then – it was then only a hyphenated open space, so they had no agreed upon point from which to determine direction so they just figured from where they were at the time.  Follow?

            At any rate, to help him secure these dromedaries from the wild, Marlin likely enlisted the aid of Honest Assim’s New and Used Camel Oasis.  (Marlin didn’t actually start capturing wild animals until he hired his young, burly, gullible protégé, Jim.)

“What you need to do, Jim, is take these two natives, wade into the water and grab that great white shark.”

“That looks a little dangerous, don’t you think, Mr. Perkins?”

“Aw, kid!  We used to do it that way all the time.  If it makes you feel any better you can shoot them with this tranquilizer dart from this $17.98 Daisy Air Pistol and then catch him in this seaweed net.”

This is how Jim reached the level he has today as the second most stitched-up man in show business after Evel Kneival.

            Where were we?  Oh, yes.  So this group would barter something for the camels – say wooly mammoth tusks, or better yet, a wooly mammoth – and then head back to Nebraska, which back then was called something more primitive, like…  Arkansas.  In order to return with these camels, or even get there in the first place, these daring zoologists had to cross the Bering Land Bridge, the remains of which now stand on either side of the Bering Strait, so called even though it’s kind of curved.  Now the bridge itself was built by early engineers as a means to get to Las Vegas for conventions and to follow escaping caribou which would swim aroundand circle back to take the beach a couple hundred yards to the south.  The hunters didn’t know that, however, so they had prehistoric construction crews build the bridge out of land.  This only makes architectural sense because this was, of course, before the “iron” age or the “bronze” age or even the “stone” age.  This was as far back as the “dirt” age, so the early engineers used dirt for everything:  bridges, houses, office buildings, computers, chicken dinners – everything.

            Finally, when the journey was complete, they placed the camels in cages – which were, of course, made of dirt.  That’s why today there is no evidence of the pens used to house the different animals.  Because of this, some archaeological scientists have come up with the inane idea that these camels found their way over here by themselves and have since become extinct.  This is the kind of far-fetched supposition which gives science a bad name.  Take all those mammoths found in the tar pits.  Archaeologists would have us believe that these animals were so stupid that one of them got stuck in the muck and the rest of them just followed him in. 

            I think it’s rather self-centered to believe that just because these mammals are not humans or that they aren’t evolved to the point of low-fat cuisine that they automatically have the intelligence of all-star wrestlers.

            I think it proves that these early people domesticated these animals – and used them on road crews where they were accidentally caught in the hot oil used to asphalt the road.