A Better Story Still

theguardian.com

I have been delighting in the results of my DNA analysis, which shows that I am the descendent of old, old migrations out of Africa, up to 100,000 years ago.

All of us, absolutely all of us, belong to that family. If ever the Siren call of what we call "race" once tempted us to think that having blue eyes, or pale skin was a sign of superiority to people who have brown eyes or deeper toned skin, then it is long since past time to admit that "race" is a fiction.

Siren call? The Sirens, of Greek mythology, were dangerous creatures who lured sailors to come their way, and their way was to a shipwreck. Their voices were sweet, and musical. Something like thinking that being White makes one superior. Going that way is to listen to a Siren song.

Jared Diamond wrote, "Guns, Germs, and Steel", to show how finding ourselves pitched on valuable resources, or devastated by rampaging disease can make or break societies. For instance, most great human societies congregated around river valleys (water, rich soil, available food, navigation), and so on. The people who found themselves in North America did not invent this rich continent: we stumbled upon it, the way life has stumbled over the whole globe.

I am reading, again, the story of the Comanche people who dominated the Great Plaines, finally overrun by newcomers to this continent who simply overwhelmed them finally, awfully, inevitably. There are Sirens calling to us about that, too, suggesting what is not true about either the Comanches or the rest of us.

The real evidence of who we are is present in almost every kind of cell in our bodies.

I recall saying to myself once, that all the information that made my life possible began with a tiny piece of my father's body, and of my mother's body, curled together in me. But it is a much richer story than that; a better story, still.

Comments

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

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