Geography isn’t what it used to be. Or should I say, geolocation isn’t what it once was? You learned that in elementary school, the stuff about the All-Lands supercontinent Alfred Wegener called Pangaea. Go back about 250 million years—give or take a week— and you would see the continent emerging from the Southern Hemisphere and plowing into the Northern Hemisphere, North America, England, and Scandinavia lying in the tropics, the Equator running through the United States. A different world back then. It was especially different for its animal life. No people. Not even pre-people. So, no social media, of course, and none of that Seven Deadly Sin stuff humans introduced to the world. Not that it was without conflict, but animal contests over food and territory are definitely different from the squabbles generated by members of the Wise species.
What if Pangaea had not broken apart back then? Would today’s life have been different had all the now scattered landmasses once lumped together in the Southern Hemisphere, many right along the Equator, not broken up? What if humanity in “leaving Africa” made no journey into subtropics and then into temperate and boreal zones? Would we all be of relative uniform skin color? Would we all be a single race, all protected from deadly UV by more melatonin in our bodies, all—how should we say it?—dark skinned? Probably. That move to temperate and boreal zones reduced the shield against UV to enhance the production of vitamin D in less sunny zones. And the downside that we should mention, was that the evolution that made light skinned humans also made them more vulnerable to sunburn and melanoma. It was the price we paid for moving, but probably an unavoidable cost given our penchant for wandering and our insatiable curiosity and restlessness. Pangaea’s breakup merely foreshadowed the African diaspora.
So, there really isn’t a Pangaean race, unless one looks at the peoples of Africa, ranging from the Abbé (Akan) people of the Ivory Coast to the Zulu of South Africa, and between A and Z some 400 different “tribes” (or peoples), all of them finding some way to distinguish themselves from all the others, and all having darker skin on average than, say, Scandinavians.
Among this superficial distinction of humans based on skin color lie the cultural distinctions that produce conflicts like the genocide attempted by Hutu against Tutsi, for example. Imagine. In one of the hubs of Pangaea, peoples closer to its existence than any others on Earth got huffy over “racial” (ethnically speaking) differences. It appears that even people of similar hue have quarrels to brew.
Leaving Africa at some debatable 60,000 years ago—again, give or take a week—the dark skinned human ancestors of Scandinavians moved throughout the reachable temperate zones, their skin lightening over the last 2,400-plus generations. Now enter Danish Hans Christian Andersen and then Disney into the skin game. No doubt unfamiliar with the history of skin color, Hans probably envisioned the Little Mermaid as fair skinned—even though the 1913 bronze statue of the iconic character in Copenhagen is now weathered to a darker color—a reverse of what happened to the surface coloring of the people who moved out of Africa. And Disney, maybe under the influence of the statue’s color—who knows?— or under the influence of wokeness, has re-envisioned the mermaid as dark skinned. So?
So what? Well, some 1.5 million people posted dislikes over the latest remake of the story, seemingly because of the skin color of the main character. Would bluish dolphin skin be more appropriate? Would there have been any controversy making the mermaid reflect an oceanic environment from which she evolved in the mind of Andersen?
We former Pangaeans certainly have a tendency to work ourselves into a dither over our relatively superficial differences. I suppose, however, that if the Hutus were driven to kill Tutsis in Rwanda, even the slightest of perceived differences can drive us to conflict. Look, for example, at the many wars fought in Europe among peoples of similar skin tones. Ironic, isn’t it? Skin tones matter only when we want them to matter.
The rise of the Internet has generated two very noticeable exacerbations of our most debased motivations: By connecting most of us, it has made uniformity of thought a way of life for geographically spread groups, and by connecting so many diverse people, it has ironically emphasized the differences and brought out the irreversible tendency to see them. A modern paradox, for sure.
What if Disney had made a blue cartoon Smurf play the mermaid role? The lead character could also be played by a member of the Blue People of Kentucky, particularly by Luna Stacy, the bluest of the Blue Fugues, the one in which methemoglobinemia caused the most cyanosis? Would there have been 1.5 million dislikes over her blue skin? Probably. Some members of the family carrying the recessive methemoglobinemia gene do live near Troublesome Creek in Kentucky. Certainly, the creek’s name is appropriate.
You know those One Worlders, the globalists? The globalists want there to be a single world government and a unification of all eight billion of us from the Nunavut town Qikiqtarjuaq in Canada to the aboriginal town of Quorrobolong in Australia. Many of the globalists have a bunch of money. You’d think they might consider a plan of unification like putting Pangaea back together even though the continents, as an outer shell of the planet, are very much like the cracked egg shell that “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put back together again.” If putting together the Hutus and Tutsis of similar color and close ethnic practice is a hard task, then putting together all those human hues spread over the planet on separated continents is probably going to be mission impossible.
I’m going out on a limb here to say that the Pangaean race is an unrealistic dream. Oh! Sure, in the cycle of formation and breakup, the continents riding on plates at speeds varying from one to about 16 centimeters per year will probably make a new supercontinent Pangaea some 250,000,000 years from now. That new Pangaea will probably lie mostly in the Northern Hemisphere. If human species, probably long dead by then, reemerge in some later version of Sapiens, then a lighter skin color might evolve to a darker one as the new diaspora spills out of the boreal and temperate zones to populate the tropics and equatorial zones.
But I don’t think there’s much chance that our replacements, given the tendency of the Wise Ones to quarrel over matters as superficial as skin color, will live in peace and harmony or will accept a mermaid of any color other than the one that matches the story’s author. I might suggest a transparent mermaid, but that would make her as invisible as a box jellyfish, which, by the way, is highly venomous. So any color—or no color—saves us from contention and conflict, from pasting likes and dislikes according to our superficial whims, and from getting along as a single species whose members come in all hues.
What if Pangaea had not broken apart back then? Would today’s life have been different had all the now scattered landmasses once lumped together in the Southern Hemisphere, many right along the Equator, not broken up? What if humanity in “leaving Africa” made no journey into subtropics and then into temperate and boreal zones? Would we all be of relative uniform skin color? Would we all be a single race, all protected from deadly UV by more melatonin in our bodies, all—how should we say it?—dark skinned? Probably. That move to temperate and boreal zones reduced the shield against UV to enhance the production of vitamin D in less sunny zones. And the downside that we should mention, was that the evolution that made light skinned humans also made them more vulnerable to sunburn and melanoma. It was the price we paid for moving, but probably an unavoidable cost given our penchant for wandering and our insatiable curiosity and restlessness. Pangaea’s breakup merely foreshadowed the African diaspora.
So, there really isn’t a Pangaean race, unless one looks at the peoples of Africa, ranging from the Abbé (Akan) people of the Ivory Coast to the Zulu of South Africa, and between A and Z some 400 different “tribes” (or peoples), all of them finding some way to distinguish themselves from all the others, and all having darker skin on average than, say, Scandinavians.
Among this superficial distinction of humans based on skin color lie the cultural distinctions that produce conflicts like the genocide attempted by Hutu against Tutsi, for example. Imagine. In one of the hubs of Pangaea, peoples closer to its existence than any others on Earth got huffy over “racial” (ethnically speaking) differences. It appears that even people of similar hue have quarrels to brew.
Leaving Africa at some debatable 60,000 years ago—again, give or take a week—the dark skinned human ancestors of Scandinavians moved throughout the reachable temperate zones, their skin lightening over the last 2,400-plus generations. Now enter Danish Hans Christian Andersen and then Disney into the skin game. No doubt unfamiliar with the history of skin color, Hans probably envisioned the Little Mermaid as fair skinned—even though the 1913 bronze statue of the iconic character in Copenhagen is now weathered to a darker color—a reverse of what happened to the surface coloring of the people who moved out of Africa. And Disney, maybe under the influence of the statue’s color—who knows?— or under the influence of wokeness, has re-envisioned the mermaid as dark skinned. So?
So what? Well, some 1.5 million people posted dislikes over the latest remake of the story, seemingly because of the skin color of the main character. Would bluish dolphin skin be more appropriate? Would there have been any controversy making the mermaid reflect an oceanic environment from which she evolved in the mind of Andersen?
We former Pangaeans certainly have a tendency to work ourselves into a dither over our relatively superficial differences. I suppose, however, that if the Hutus were driven to kill Tutsis in Rwanda, even the slightest of perceived differences can drive us to conflict. Look, for example, at the many wars fought in Europe among peoples of similar skin tones. Ironic, isn’t it? Skin tones matter only when we want them to matter.
The rise of the Internet has generated two very noticeable exacerbations of our most debased motivations: By connecting most of us, it has made uniformity of thought a way of life for geographically spread groups, and by connecting so many diverse people, it has ironically emphasized the differences and brought out the irreversible tendency to see them. A modern paradox, for sure.
What if Disney had made a blue cartoon Smurf play the mermaid role? The lead character could also be played by a member of the Blue People of Kentucky, particularly by Luna Stacy, the bluest of the Blue Fugues, the one in which methemoglobinemia caused the most cyanosis? Would there have been 1.5 million dislikes over her blue skin? Probably. Some members of the family carrying the recessive methemoglobinemia gene do live near Troublesome Creek in Kentucky. Certainly, the creek’s name is appropriate.
You know those One Worlders, the globalists? The globalists want there to be a single world government and a unification of all eight billion of us from the Nunavut town Qikiqtarjuaq in Canada to the aboriginal town of Quorrobolong in Australia. Many of the globalists have a bunch of money. You’d think they might consider a plan of unification like putting Pangaea back together even though the continents, as an outer shell of the planet, are very much like the cracked egg shell that “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put back together again.” If putting together the Hutus and Tutsis of similar color and close ethnic practice is a hard task, then putting together all those human hues spread over the planet on separated continents is probably going to be mission impossible.
I’m going out on a limb here to say that the Pangaean race is an unrealistic dream. Oh! Sure, in the cycle of formation and breakup, the continents riding on plates at speeds varying from one to about 16 centimeters per year will probably make a new supercontinent Pangaea some 250,000,000 years from now. That new Pangaea will probably lie mostly in the Northern Hemisphere. If human species, probably long dead by then, reemerge in some later version of Sapiens, then a lighter skin color might evolve to a darker one as the new diaspora spills out of the boreal and temperate zones to populate the tropics and equatorial zones.
But I don’t think there’s much chance that our replacements, given the tendency of the Wise Ones to quarrel over matters as superficial as skin color, will live in peace and harmony or will accept a mermaid of any color other than the one that matches the story’s author. I might suggest a transparent mermaid, but that would make her as invisible as a box jellyfish, which, by the way, is highly venomous. So any color—or no color—saves us from contention and conflict, from pasting likes and dislikes according to our superficial whims, and from getting along as a single species whose members come in all hues.
RSS Feed