Humanity's Sense of Superiority c.2,500,000BC-2007AD

The death of Humanity's Sense of Superiority over its fellow creatures will come as a shock to all those who - while troubled by such daily cares as the grind of work, the quest for love or the renewed threats of both nuclear conflict and appearances by Noel Edmonds on TV - were able to console themselves with the knowledge that they were at least brighter than a chimp.

The Sense of Superiority's death comes following the discovery by researchers from the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies in Cambridge that Senegalese chimpanzees band together to hunt using hand-crafted (or, rather, hand-and-tooth-crafted) spears - thus proving themselves to possess two of humanity's most highly prized assets: (a) the ability to make use of tools and (b) the ability to get their kicks by running round and killing things.

Humanity's Sense of Superiority was born in around 2,500,000BC when early hominid Australopithecus first discovered how to make simple digging tools from polished stones, thus enabling her to dig further and faster than rivals without endangering her nails, opening up new and exciting manicure possibilities as well as a diet of previously unreachable tubers, thus paving the way for the potato to take over the diet of Western human beings two-and-a-half-billion years later.

The Sense of Superiority was to go from strength to strength when another human ancestor, Homo erectus, discovered how to make use of tools to create fire, either after watching the effects of a lightning strike on the arid African savannah in which he lived or as part of a complex scam involving taking out a million rocks' worth of fire insurance on his home tree . The use of fire immediately put the hominid one-up on all his fellow creatures, enabling him to bask in the glow of his Superiority, not to mention the embers of his former home and a brand new million-rock fortune.

Soon mankind was wandering across the whole globe, feeling smug as he set fire to things and made use of tools which steadily advanced from simple heated cooking stones, through bows and arrows all the way to such modern-day tools as the computer and the BBC weatherman who signs off with "And that's your weather ... for now".

While Humanity's Sense of Superiority initially seemed to survive the potentially fatal discovery that fellow primates were also capable of making use of tools to assist them in achieving their goals, it fell into a steep decline when it realised that, rather than spending its time making computers and watching annoying weathermen, it could have spent the last two million years happily running around chasing things with sticks.

Humanity's Sense of Superiority will be cremated, just as soon as the chimps succeed in working out what to do with the matches. It is survived by Charlton Heston, a half-buried Statue of Liberty and a bunch of damned dirty apes.