Thoughts on the Journey of Mankind

A Long Now post pointed to a cool animation showing the migration of humans over the past 160,000 years, since modern humans arose in Africa.

There’s a lot the gets me thinking when I read about ancient human history, such as what was life like, or what did the world look, smell, and sound like.

The post references an event that made my head spin when I found out about it long ago – a massive volcano eruption that caused a 6 year extended winter and left an estimated 10,000 humans alive. That’s one heck of a bottleneck.

In ‘Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan suggested that our myths and fears of reptiles might be some genetic memory of the age of dinosaurs (there were only teeny mammals back then). But, that has always made me wonder what deep ingrained memory we might have from events 10-, 20-, or 100-thousand years ago. Might we have some sort of recollection of this massive volcano eruption, some memory encoded in our culture, way of living, or language?

And looking at this animation, I was reminded how much of the human population was along the coastlines. Yeah, I read that many time before, but seeing it in an animation made the point stick.

All this beach-combing reminded me of one of the many questions I have been carrying unanswered: ‘Why are children so in love with water – pools and beaches?’. Might the extreme psychic draw to play in water that children exhibit be to learn some sort of critical survival skill for a coastal species?