Sort of a synthesis by a former cave dweller

 

Some of you may have noticed that Thanksgiving, 2015, came and went in the United States last week. That is what I did, too -- I came and I went .... mostly went -- away from my home, from my blog, from my routines. I escaped for six days. And, by the way, I will again toward the end of this week and toward the end of next week, although I might bring my laptop with me on those jaunts. Maybe. We shall see. I am hoping my next metamorphosis is under way.

Next, the photographs: Those who read here regularly may be aware that much of my life as a boy and a young man revolved around hunting. The photographs illustrate one reason why I no longer hunt. Like any skill, those who study hunting and practice hunting (and, I might add, have a natural talent for hunting), generally become good at it. This is to say that hunting should become child's play after a time, something any fool can become adept at doing. The photographs were taken on a frigid, windy day, with blowing snow and the atmosphere hazy with dampness, which obviously affected the technical quality. That aside, my questions are these: If I can learn to reach this proximity to a whitetail buck in the wild, anyone who claims to be a "hunter" should be able to do the same, right? Which means, would shooting this buck be sport or merely murder of an animal? Hunting really has not been much of a challenge since the days of the saber-toothed cat and the Pleistocene bears, and should be re-evaluated in terms of thinking of it as "sport." There is nothing sporting about it.

Next, the music: For me, a glimpse back to more interesting times and a means to wander in memory for a few moments; for Western Civilization, a reminder of what its indolence has set adrift and is on the verge of losing in the face of a merciless tidal wave. Do you really understand this ??

Here I am again, lost in the futility of disorder

I grew up in a town and a state which were about one hundred years old in context to the existence of the United States and in a country a few hundred years old itself. I have walked among ruins in Europe several hundred and even a few thousand years old. I have seen populations linked to Native Americans and other groups which, only a few brief generations ago, were still tied to the stone age.

All that is difficult for me to grasp at times when thinking in terms of the typical human life span, but what I really have to struggle to comprehend are the hundreds of thousands of lives of homo sapiens and homo sapiens sapiens which came and went in the hundreds of thousands of years before "now."

I am not thinking about "Lucy" or her hominin kin, Australopithecus afarensis, who walked our Earth more than three million years ago. My mind cannot firmly grasp such a span of time when measuring/understanding my own existence, which is measured in hours and months and years .... and, in breaths. Later, maybe I will try, but not today. Let us reduce those years to the hundreds of thousands, presumably a span easier to comprehend.

The word Neanderthal should be familiar to most. They have been known and studied for about one hundred fifty years. But, there also are the Denisovans, whose existence was recognized only about four years ago. This group split from homo sapiens around six hundred thousand (600,000) years ago. Wrap your conceptual self-perception around that, if you are able, understanding that DNA markers from both groups are among your own.

Mix into that cocktail established DNA markers of a known third species and of an apparent fourth. There is growing evidence of other archaic groups predating humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. And, if you really are looking to complicate matters, jump way, way back beyond the establishment of genus homo and you will discover that we are a very late arrival to planet Earth and certainly not the first to believe we are the best, brightest and most beautiful ever to be born.

Our march toward becoming what we are today began millions of years ago. Regrettably, we, who are alive today, probably are closer toward ending that march than any of those who came before us.

My point for this, other than the fact it all interests me, is not to sound like a purveyor of doom and destruction or to say we live a purposeless existence, but to create a visual image of life going on from generation to generation of changing, evolving populations of varied human species. Then, place the visual image of those seemingly endless generations living in a single cave complex in, for instance, southern Siberia for a hypothetical number of years -- say one hundred thousand (100,000). Then, realize that throughout all those generations of beings and all those years of them coming and going, change was happening, but was almost imperceptible -- until now.

Imagine yourself, if you are able, seated comfortably before the entrance to that cave, watching the comings and goings of individuals, of sons and daughters as they become parents and then grow old and die, and each generation flowing into the next, affected by plagues, by changes in climatic patterns, by the appearance and disappearance of warlike strangers entering their habitat and departing from it .... seeing near-imperceptible change in garb, in diet, in weaponry, in appearance, in religious patterns .... imagine it if you can while you are seated comfortably as if in a theater watching a film rendition of every ancestor you have had during those 100,000 years, good and evil, happy and sad, intelligent and dull, everything which once was and has been transmitted into you.

So then, what does your existence mean in context of the next 100,000 years as your genes pass along this timeless trail? Or, is the trail about to abruptly end? Now that we have evolved into creatures wise enough to depart from living in the cave and have become the best, brightest and most beautiful ever to be born, will there even be another 100,000 years of us? Beyond the cave or, maybe, back into the cave, if at all? 

If the visual image is planted and you are comfortably seated and have the time to think about these things, do they mean anything at all to you personally?

I will answer my own question: Probably not.

I wonder if the time has arrived for me to start hunting again ....