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Spinning Like a Top?

The town of Jericho, as in "Joshua fit the battle of . . ."--
that Jericho--is thought to be about 10,000 years old.
In Palestine, the people of Jericho thought it might be nice
to make Jericho a focal point for their own cause,
but the celebration is just barely fizzling along.
For one thing, there is no sewer system in one of the
oldest cities human beings ever settled into.

At the same time that Jericho is thought to have been founded,
or settled, or perhaps just happened to come into being,
wooly mammoths with 18 foot tusks were living in what is now
Snowmass, Colorado.  More bones were discovered there.
The first North American peoples were wandering in,
probably from Siberia, over Alaska, through Wasilla.

Villages, or towns--really just settlements made possible
because human beings were learning how to change
from being a nomadic people to an agricultural people.
The knowledge of how to domesticate crops and animals
meant  that people did not have to follow wild herds,
or forage farther and farther away, to find food.
They grew it, stored it, and settled down into fixed places.
Jericho is one of the first known of such places.

Ten thousand years is almost only a blink in long human history.
If human critters are three million years old, more or less,
and we were to equate that with--let us say--seventy years
of human life, then Jericho happened when we were 69 years
and 9 months old.  Or, if you would like to use the same analogy
for modern human beings--homo sapiens--then Jericho was
founded when we were about 67 years old.  We chased
rabbits and wild oats for most of our existence.

No wonder we are a bit dizzy with the pace of change;
with looking up at the horizon and seeing a whole human race
come wandering toward us.  For most of our existence,
we have been hunters and gatherers.  Agriculture defined
some of us for only the last 10,000 years.  Industrial life
is even less common for fewer of us for only about 300 years.

And now we carry cell phones for almost instant communication
with almost anybody almost anywhere on earth.  Our food
comes from Latin America, and New Zealand, and the Arctic.

That feeling of confusion, and anxiety, is understandable.

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