The great elephant illusion cont. ; cabalistic symbols, or bunnies and top hats. i repeat: for the gag to work, it must look ordinary. the zipper should be a bright and contrasting color -- white or red, for example. i use both, since i had two zippers of those colors while playing around with the idea of doing the afghan bands with zippers. well, why not? ; leave the zipper about one-third unzipped, so it will be instantly identifiable for what it is. the audience is not going to tear up the house over this little routine; however, they'll probably be talking about it long after they've forgotten the linking-ring routine that took you six months to learn and which proves that you have far to much time on your hands ; . have fun with this; your audience certainly will. peter marucci 270 st. andrew st. east fergus, ontario, canada n1m 1r1 e-mail: showtimecol aol. Human speech had become so divisive a topic that the society banned all discussion of the subject. even today the selection pressures that led to language are hotly disputed. a major difficulty in shedding light on the issue is the paucity of relevant evidence. traditionally, research has focused on endocasts, the fossilized interiors of the skull, which enable investigators to compare the brains of primeval humans with the brains of their modern descendants. more recently the inquiry was widened to include the natural history of the vocal tract, whose configuration and placement in ancient skeletons can be inferred from the shape of the base of the skull. ancient tools and other artifacts are also clues to the origins of speech. anthropologists speculate that, in general, the more complex a tool was, the more likely language was necessary for its creation. by that criterion, the first evidence of language dates back at least 50, 000 years, to about the time people first migrated from africa to australia. the complexity of the boats needed to make such a journey bespeaks an ability among people to communicate with one another through language. but what about language in earlier times, when the tools were spears and axes? answers are hard to come by. the anthropologist robin i. m. dun bar of university college london has now proposed a novel approach to the questions of language origins, which could partly circumvent the shortage of fossil evidence. while studying social primates, dunbar began to wonder why, aside from hygiene, the animals spend so much time grooming one another. he noted that the larger the social group, the more time is spent on grooming. he then and poker superstars.