Walking along the beach this week, I saw several “creatures” washed ashore. Looking into the eye of one of them, the squid, I couldn’t help but see a portion of myself.
Are we related?
When we hear the word “ancestor”, who does that bring to mind?
It is easy to hold to the notion that one’s grandparents or great, great grandparents are our ancestors. Even going back ten, twenty and thirty generations is easy enough to hold to the notion that those people born 1000 years ago are biologically linked to us.
What gets increasingly more difficult to embody is the notion that our “ancestors” might not look like us.
I’m not talking about “Cro-Magnon” ancestors; I’m implying someone, something who was our forebear in the very, very, very distant past. Not in the Tertiary time period, nor the Cretaceous or Jurassic. Or even the Devonian. We’re looking back 500 million years ago into the Cambrian when the earliest members of our family tree were floating about in sun warmed ponds.
In this family, one brother swam off to the right, a sister swam off to the left and your great grandmother (to the 10th power) stayed put and married the boy next door.
The rest they say, is evolutionary history. The ancient brother’s fate eventually led to today’s Fairy penguin; his sister’s fate the Squid; all of us reading this blog arrived as humans, and, somewhere in all this the sea gull flew in.
Bill Bryson, in ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything, says this:
“The tiniest deviation” (i.e. swimming left or right) “and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.”
And, for a good reason to wake up with a smile every morning, consider this by Bryson, as well:
“Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favoured evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely — make that miraculously — fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.”
Three cheers for our good fortune. May we do good with the time we have been given.
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