Just One Thousand Families

We are blood, you and I

Photo by Sébastien Goldberg on Unsplash

We were watching a documentary about human migration into Asia, which is supposed to have happened some 100,000 years ago.

I wanted to argue that when “we” arrived in Asia, there were already humans there. Humans of a different genetic makeup, yes, but we still carry some of those genes. In fact, we carry a mixture of many “failed” human genes. Are we “us” or “them”? Would we have had the intelligence to be where we are today without those pathetic also-rans? Some of those extinct variants roughly go back another 100,000 years, so it really does take a lot of chutzpah to call them failures and applaud our success.

Early human migrations

That’s especially true when you look at the mess “we” have made of things.

But never mind that. What was also running through my mind was the hundred thousand year figure. In geologic time, that’s nothing, but for us, it’s far, far away. We oh-so brilliant mutant apes can’t truly grasp large numbers like that, so we resort to comparisons like the one that puts us on a 24-hour clock where we get less than two…