A Gardener's Diary

[Monksdream]

SITTING beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old.

William Faulkner
Light in August
1932

The way I will comment is not what you would expect. How we, as a species, are the way we are now is nothing more than a continuation of our cultural evolution. We're still, well, some of us, anyway, are still trying to figure out how we can somehow, some way, get along with each other without resorting to violence, for instance. We're trying to figure out ways to achieve what some of us believe are noble ideals. One might be how humans create social orders with the goal of providing the greatest good for the greatest number of its participants. Some social orders at present appear to be more successful at this achieving this goal than others.

The story of man, that is to say, modern man, isn't that old. At some point millions of years ago, hominid creatures shared, genetically speaking, a common ancestor. From this ancestor, which could be considered as the trunk of a tree, two distinct species evolved that formed two branches. One branch evolved into the apes, of which there are now many living species. The other branch evolved into hominid creatures that eventually evolved into modern humans.

The consensus view (there is always some disagreement) among paleontologists is modern humans originated in Africa. The evidence, however, is scant. The bones scientists have collected of the earliest hominid creatures would fit into the bed of a pickup truck. That is hardly enough evidence to enable the academics who study prehistoric hominids to arrive at solid conclusions about when and how modern man came to be. Advances in evolutionary biology, however, have helped academics arrive at satisfactory assumptions of how prehistoric hominids became modern humans.

Which leads me to posing a question: When did the story of modern man begin? It is a question best answered by Spencer Wells and his amazing documentary The Journey of Man.
journey of man spencer wells - Bing video

journey of man spencer wells - Bing video



What is important to understand about Wells' documentary is why a small number modern humans who were living in Africa 50,000 or so years decided to go on a journey. The causation of that collective decision, Wells postulates, was due to climate change. The geological record supports this supposition. Some 70 to 50 thousand years ago an ice age began. Water in the oceans became ice. These early humans were mostly hunters, and the pickings were easy until the onset of that ice age, when food in the region of Africa where they lived became scarce.

The fact that a small group of humans, perhaps no more than ten, decided to migrate without having a clue about what the conditions would be like elsewhere, in itself is remarkable. Wells supports his supposition based on genetic evidence. Humans spent the next 30 to 40 thousand years migrating to point they, or we, now live just about anywhere on the planet. We are, strictly by the numbers, a successful species.