I’ve written several beginnings recently but when I come back with new eyes they give the writing a thumbs down. I’ve been thinking and reading about paleolithic (Stone Age) people. It is hard to imagine how long the culture was stuck in the hunter gatherer mode. Technology amounted to simple bone tools and a stone spear point with sharp edges. That didn’t change for twenty five thousand years, likely longer. Humans were modern in a physical and mental sense but limited to what they could do with their bare hands. Everything they couldn’t understand was mysterious and fearsome so they made up parallel stories (myth) that they could understand. It was the beginning of fake news.
It occurred to me that once upon a time, say 15,000 BCE, a woman birthed a child who grew up to replicate and reproduce another child who followed suit and did the same. That sets up a pedigree, the blood line linkage between parent and child from generation to generation. Some people can document their pedigree as far back as the Middle Ages but most of us stumble before we get to our great-great-great generation. Even so, there is an unbroken stream of DNA linkage that runs back from me through my parents, through all of my great-greats all the way back to hunter gatherer clans, 750 generations removed. I don’t need to know anything personal about any of them. It is enough to know that without them there would be no place for me to come from and after all; Nothing comes from nothing.
So I am retired, able to sleep late if I please but I please to be up early, watch the birds at my feeder, have coffee or tea, make sawdust in my wood shop, wait for glue to dry, water my tomatoes, make a phone call to hear another human voice and think about things only curious old men would imagine. Then I sit down and write a short piece about something that crossed my mind. If it lives long enough to make it through an edit and into my journal maybe even posted on my blog, someone may stumble across it. But as I’ve shared so many times, I write to understand more than to be understood. I am amazed with the mind boggling numbers, so many archaic, prehistoric people who never, ever gave a thought to their place in the blood line, to the possibility that I might be far, far, so far downstream in the making. Then they laid down a continuous stream of genetic material that would find its way through millennia and materialize in a blue-eyed little boy. That little boy would be me. I don’t advocate ancestor worship but I do feel its appeal.
It occurred to me that once upon a time, say 15,000 BCE, a woman birthed a child who grew up to replicate and reproduce another child who followed suit and did the same. That sets up a pedigree, the blood line linkage between parent and child from generation to generation. Some people can document their pedigree as far back as the Middle Ages but most of us stumble before we get to our great-great-great generation. Even so, there is an unbroken stream of DNA linkage that runs back from me through my parents, through all of my great-greats all the way back to hunter gatherer clans, 750 generations removed. I don’t need to know anything personal about any of them. It is enough to know that without them there would be no place for me to come from and after all; Nothing comes from nothing.
So I am retired, able to sleep late if I please but I please to be up early, watch the birds at my feeder, have coffee or tea, make sawdust in my wood shop, wait for glue to dry, water my tomatoes, make a phone call to hear another human voice and think about things only curious old men would imagine. Then I sit down and write a short piece about something that crossed my mind. If it lives long enough to make it through an edit and into my journal maybe even posted on my blog, someone may stumble across it. But as I’ve shared so many times, I write to understand more than to be understood. I am amazed with the mind boggling numbers, so many archaic, prehistoric people who never, ever gave a thought to their place in the blood line, to the possibility that I might be far, far, so far downstream in the making. Then they laid down a continuous stream of genetic material that would find its way through millennia and materialize in a blue-eyed little boy. That little boy would be me. I don’t advocate ancestor worship but I do feel its appeal.
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