What a contradiction we’ve become! Spread as we are over the planet and even high above the planet, we still exhibit a tribalism of ideologies. How strange in light of our past interconnections. That visiting alien we sometimes speak of would have great difficulty understanding how we can be simultaneously cosmopolitan and parochial.
Where have you gone? Across a continent? Other continents? Islands? The questions are germane in a period of widespread travel by just about everyone who has a desire to pick up and go. Now Qiaomei Fu’s study of Tianyuan Man’s genome seems to indicate that picking up and going has been a longtime human habit. Tianyuan Man shared DNA with a person who lived in Belgium’s Goyet Caves, and, according to the researcher and her colleagues also with the Karitiana and Sururi peoples of Brazil and Argentina and with Boliva’s Chane people. Hey, someone did some traveling and procreating in different places. These distant relatives, however, don’t share that DNA with North America’s native populations. Puzzling. Was their separation just a matter of geographic isolation? Or, did they just not want to associate?
The typical explanation for the distribution of peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere is that people from northern Asia walked across the Bering Land Bridge before heading south to populate the two continents and the isthmus that connects them. A second hypothesis is that some people made the journey from Polynesia to Easter Island and beyond, all the way to the west coast of South America. Yet, those people of Brazil, Argentina, and Boliva have, instead, a connection to a European and an Asian common ancestor more so than they have to their ancient contemporaries in North America or Polynesia.
In their abstract, Fu and colleagues write, “Our study of the Tianyuan individual highlights the complex migration and subdivision of early human populations in Eurasia.”* The interconnections of our ancient ancestors boggle the mind. In a time without the benefits of modern transportation, the ancients didn’t have our traveling resources, so the process of connecting DNA was a long one, and in the case of Tianyuan and Goyet, separated by thousands of years. It was not a purposeful connection, of course, just as today’s biological connections are equally random—a chance meeting between a flight attendant and a passenger in an airport bar that results in a family. We gained our biological connectivity slowly. That is the context that brings us to our present state of worldwide connectivity. Since the Age of Exploration, we have become more biologically intertwined than we ever were since we left our African points of origin. The mail, the phone, and the Web have furthered the connections. So, in the context of our millennia of connections and our current unifying technological connections, why is it that a visiting alien would find us separated in a tribalism of thought?
The world is our shared place more than ever, and, regardless of voices to the contrary, there is very little evidence to support the existence of a “pure race.” Someone sometime mated with someone slightly different. The reproductive processors have mixed DNA across the planet. Outside Africa, the seeming diversity of humanity is refuted by connections even more so than it is within some long-inhabited places within Africa. We have much in common biologically—thus, we are a single species, and in spite of the variety in our appearances, we are fundamentally related.
The visiting alien might say, “We’ve been watching you for a millennium, and what we noticed puzzles us. You had this guy—Gutenberg, I think—invent a machine that helped you convey thoughts around the planet, making it possible for everyone to know what humans were thinking in different times and places. How is it that with that technology you haven’t come to understand different ideas sufficiently to reach compromises? Why are you still so tribal?”
How will you answer? Will you say, “Now, there’s obviously much good in the connection of ideas, but unlike the biological connection, the intellectual one imposes certain constraints on itself. We seem to balk at thinking alike, so we divide along simplified lines of difference. Recognizing differences seems to be tied to our desire for security. We have a tendency to see differences personally as though they are threats or actual attacks. And we are fort- and castle-builders: We have a tendency to gather into ideological tribes. That tendency simultaneously unites and isolates us. Possibly, we also divide along simplified ideological boundaries because we are lazy thinkers. It takes considerable effort to pursue all the ramifications of our ideas, and in many instances—if not all instances—we might find contradictions in the logical ends of our positions.”
The mesh of ideas is not as easy as the mesh of biology. Tianyuan and Goyet were chance relationships driven by wandering individuals over thousands of years. In contrast, our ideological unity is incestuous. Reinforcement of favored thought has meant building a new tribalism in an era of interconnectivity with a universality never experienced on our planet. When we meet a new ideology through any of our communication or travel technologies, we have a tendency to stay with the “locals.” Puzzling! After millennia of traveling and connecting, we find ourselves reproducing our ideas in isolation. Our ideas have become as hereditary as the Hapsburg lip.
* https://phys.org/news/2013-01-ancient-dna-reveals-humans-years.html#nRlv and
Fu, Qiaomei, et. al. DNA analysis of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave, China, PNAS vol 119, no. 6, 2223-2227. http://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2223.short
Where have you gone? Across a continent? Other continents? Islands? The questions are germane in a period of widespread travel by just about everyone who has a desire to pick up and go. Now Qiaomei Fu’s study of Tianyuan Man’s genome seems to indicate that picking up and going has been a longtime human habit. Tianyuan Man shared DNA with a person who lived in Belgium’s Goyet Caves, and, according to the researcher and her colleagues also with the Karitiana and Sururi peoples of Brazil and Argentina and with Boliva’s Chane people. Hey, someone did some traveling and procreating in different places. These distant relatives, however, don’t share that DNA with North America’s native populations. Puzzling. Was their separation just a matter of geographic isolation? Or, did they just not want to associate?
The typical explanation for the distribution of peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere is that people from northern Asia walked across the Bering Land Bridge before heading south to populate the two continents and the isthmus that connects them. A second hypothesis is that some people made the journey from Polynesia to Easter Island and beyond, all the way to the west coast of South America. Yet, those people of Brazil, Argentina, and Boliva have, instead, a connection to a European and an Asian common ancestor more so than they have to their ancient contemporaries in North America or Polynesia.
In their abstract, Fu and colleagues write, “Our study of the Tianyuan individual highlights the complex migration and subdivision of early human populations in Eurasia.”* The interconnections of our ancient ancestors boggle the mind. In a time without the benefits of modern transportation, the ancients didn’t have our traveling resources, so the process of connecting DNA was a long one, and in the case of Tianyuan and Goyet, separated by thousands of years. It was not a purposeful connection, of course, just as today’s biological connections are equally random—a chance meeting between a flight attendant and a passenger in an airport bar that results in a family. We gained our biological connectivity slowly. That is the context that brings us to our present state of worldwide connectivity. Since the Age of Exploration, we have become more biologically intertwined than we ever were since we left our African points of origin. The mail, the phone, and the Web have furthered the connections. So, in the context of our millennia of connections and our current unifying technological connections, why is it that a visiting alien would find us separated in a tribalism of thought?
The world is our shared place more than ever, and, regardless of voices to the contrary, there is very little evidence to support the existence of a “pure race.” Someone sometime mated with someone slightly different. The reproductive processors have mixed DNA across the planet. Outside Africa, the seeming diversity of humanity is refuted by connections even more so than it is within some long-inhabited places within Africa. We have much in common biologically—thus, we are a single species, and in spite of the variety in our appearances, we are fundamentally related.
The visiting alien might say, “We’ve been watching you for a millennium, and what we noticed puzzles us. You had this guy—Gutenberg, I think—invent a machine that helped you convey thoughts around the planet, making it possible for everyone to know what humans were thinking in different times and places. How is it that with that technology you haven’t come to understand different ideas sufficiently to reach compromises? Why are you still so tribal?”
How will you answer? Will you say, “Now, there’s obviously much good in the connection of ideas, but unlike the biological connection, the intellectual one imposes certain constraints on itself. We seem to balk at thinking alike, so we divide along simplified lines of difference. Recognizing differences seems to be tied to our desire for security. We have a tendency to see differences personally as though they are threats or actual attacks. And we are fort- and castle-builders: We have a tendency to gather into ideological tribes. That tendency simultaneously unites and isolates us. Possibly, we also divide along simplified ideological boundaries because we are lazy thinkers. It takes considerable effort to pursue all the ramifications of our ideas, and in many instances—if not all instances—we might find contradictions in the logical ends of our positions.”
The mesh of ideas is not as easy as the mesh of biology. Tianyuan and Goyet were chance relationships driven by wandering individuals over thousands of years. In contrast, our ideological unity is incestuous. Reinforcement of favored thought has meant building a new tribalism in an era of interconnectivity with a universality never experienced on our planet. When we meet a new ideology through any of our communication or travel technologies, we have a tendency to stay with the “locals.” Puzzling! After millennia of traveling and connecting, we find ourselves reproducing our ideas in isolation. Our ideas have become as hereditary as the Hapsburg lip.
* https://phys.org/news/2013-01-ancient-dna-reveals-humans-years.html#nRlv and
Fu, Qiaomei, et. al. DNA analysis of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave, China, PNAS vol 119, no. 6, 2223-2227. http://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2223.short
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