The Anti-Human Age: Post-Script to “The Slowest Miracle”

 

Welcome to The Anti-Human Age: essays about the human animal living in the modern world. Read on, you sexy ape.

There is one important aspect of the larger picture of human evolution that I left out of my previous essay: “extinct” may not always be an accurate description for every vanished human population.

The older I get, the more I realize everything in the Universe occurs across spectrums. Light. Temperature. Pitch. Neurology. Sexuality. Evolution too. Growing up, many of us saw some version of Rudolph Zallinger’s 1965 evolutionary artwork, “The March of Progress.” One primitive ape becomes another, then another, then another, until eventually you get to us. It is simple, memorable, and flat out wrong. Human evolution was not a parade.

Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo sapiens, and other known and unknown human populations were not sealed inside separate biological boxes. They met. They mixed. They had children. Pleistocene Homos of different flavors found themselves in the blender of Africa and Eurasia, and they became part of a tasty new treat. When bananas, strawberries, pineapple, kiwi, orange juice, honey, and ice go into a blender, the individual fruits do not go extinct. They become a smoothie.

Some human populations vanished as distinct peoples. That matters. Their unique forms, cultures, maybe languages, and ways of being are gone. Yet some part of them continued through admixture, inheritance, and descent. They were not merely erased. They were absorbed, transformed, and carried forward.

This blows my mind, dude. The implication is that we do not have one direct ancestor, we have a spectrum of ancestors. The human family is not a line or even a simple tree. It is more like a series of branching rivers and tributaries, breaking off and converging at multiple points before the ultimate convergence.

Your mom.

When I contemplate how diverse and multidimensional human ancestry is, my ancestry, I come face to face with the beautiful truth that I am nature: a living example of the vast spectrum of life on Planet Earth, deeply entangled, interconnected, and related in ways that transcend Euclid. The pattern begins to look less like a ladder and more like fractal geometry moving through the evolutionary process. Why wouldn’t it? Your nervous system looks fractal. So does your circulatory system and the connections of the neurons in your brain. If living systems repeatedly organize themselves in fractal-like ways, it becomes difficult not to see evolution itself as participating in a similar pattern.

Once upon a time, there was a single-celled bacterium.

It was your ancestor, a grandparent of profound greatness.

There is no line to be drawn from it to you because life is not a line. It is a fractal geometric pattern moving through time.