2004-01-13

There's this test I have to take in 6 weeks on the history of everything - it's so I'll be allowed to teach people things. So I'm studying, even though there's not nearly enough time before the test for me to get through everything, and I know hardly anything to begin with. Of course what I'm writing here must be background for the reading public, since there's no reason at all that I should need or want in the future to know that in early 2004 I was going to be unprepared for a test.

     HOWEVER.
     Later on I might want to recall how fantastically exciting hominids are! Probably, at an employer's request, I'll have become focused on some other more recent history and I'll have forgotten that the subject of HUMAN EVOLUTION shines absolutely thrillingly hot on one's cranial frisbee, warps it into a plastic pink pringle, and chucks it right down the Grand Canyon.
     Consider first, a million years: one year, ten years, a hundred years... now extend that to a thousand years and then take a thousand of those. Think how far down the historical hole a million years is. It's a dark and seriously nighmarish abyss, that kind of hole. Okay now reach down in there two or three million years deep and pull out some bones. I know we all know it already but I'd like to remind us that we have the actual bones of human prototype beings and that those bones are three million years old. I have a hard time understanding that bones that old can be something other than the bones of the devil.
     Do you know how many people like you and me lived and died in three million years? Had lives, ate potatoes? How many family lines ran their course?

     Now, let's remember how our faces used to be a little bit dog-like.
     We had dog-like faces for tens of thousands of years. Things changed very slowly and the mechanism for change was death. Try to think through centuries, spending days digging potatoes in the cold, and then being huddled next to your aunt in a cave. And then she dies, and then you die, and then your children and their children and a hundred more generations sit around the cave and then die, and eventually someone learns to harbor fire and some generations sit in the cave a little warmer. Then maybe swamps come, and swamp-suited homies survive in greater numbers than land-suited ones... and then later when the ice comes, the large number of swampers allows for the survival of the swamper line... and then maybe several thousand more years pass before our brains can even conceive of a windbreak made of stones.
  Just imagine your dog face sitting in the drafty cave, being unable to think of building a warm hut out of mud and sticks or rocks. For hundreds of centuries, that was us and that was life on earth.
     Today we have potato-like faces, and we don't know for how much longer we'll have those, nor for how much longer we'll be huddling around tvs. We can guess pretty accurately at when the Earth's human population will reach for example ten billion, and how many cars and aluminum cans will exist at that time, but we're less sure about when robots will take all the jobs and collapse the world's economies.

     You can see how it doesn't get much more intense than hominids. Scary deep time-pit, dog-faces, hell-eternal pacing, old-as-god dug-up wrist-bones, and neanderthals wore CLOTHES! ...and then, you know, Holy Roman Empire, Industrial Revolution, War on Drugs. Totally outrageous.

     Concrete, cotton, straw.


0 Comments

 First

 List

 Email

 Comments

 Latest

statcounter.com