The Bugs Ask: Why Are Humans Here?
Not long ago a friend had me read the recent book by Dan Brown (you'd know him as the author of The Davinci Code and other popular fiction thrillers); in the book the theme kept asking two questions about human: Where did we come from, and Where are we going? As to the ending I'll will simply direct you back to the last post for the answer (it's there, if you look). One of the things that rings a bit more true for me about who we are or why are we
here is that despite our brawn and our bold egos, we might merely be a
host species for DNA (the idea behind the movie Prometheus) the premise being that DNA more or less seeks whatever carrier it can find to continue preserving its
life, whether that host is human, animal, plant or who knows what out there in space. But then came that
digging and those bugs.
The digging part is from an interesting series of lectures by archeologist, Dr. Eric H. Cline. Listening to his talks one can only be humbled by the excavations of the past, some digs uncovering city after city, each atop one another (sometimes 20 or more!). Excavating the city of Troy in Turkey (the debate is whether Homer's epic poem depicted history or simply his imagination) uncovered no less than 9 cities, each stacked or rebuilt on top of one another. There was also news from Stonehenge (which is now believed to have once been a complete circle) with the nearby discovery of Superhenge: Most exciting is that they have also found another megalithic monument that is less than 2 miles from Stonehenge and probably dates to about the same time, that is, 4,500 years ago...It consists of more than 50 giant stones that formed a large C-shaped enclosure. The stones are each about 10 to 15 feet long and about 5 feet wide. All of them are buried horizontally, rather than standing upright, and are about 3 feet below the surface, which is why they hadn’t been spotted before. It is only through remote-sensing techniques that they have now been discovered and recorded. Somewhat similar stone structures have been uncovered in Egypt (30 so far but more are expected), each stone carved with figures of animals such as scorpions and lizards and some stones as large as 16 feet across; but what's most interesting is that these stones are so far proving to be twice as old as Stonehenge and all from a period before carving, etching, and moving tools were thought to have been invented. So where did we come from?
To answer that right off the bat, I'll deny everything...I don't have the answer, the credentials, or the theories. As to where we are going, I always tell everyone that there's only one certainty and that is that we will all find out (likely me sooner than you, dear reader). What's most interesting to me about these archeological digs however is that few traces of human bones remain. Pottery, once it was invented, is evident in shards here and there, as are many drawings*...but bones, not so much. Perhaps it is because our bones are different than most, their interior featuring a web of cell-producing marrow to produce our life-giving red blood cells (elephants bones are solid and have no such structure, something physically necessary for supporting their weight). Or perhaps the calcified composition of our bones is simply too weak to withstand the ravages of the weather or chemicals in the soils. But in dig after dig, human bones rarely appear in many of the excavations of early sites (and we're talking centuries and older here). And when hearing about the reconstruction of cities directly on top of other cities, one has to wonder about the passage of time and how fleeting it must all be. Imagine picturing everything you hold dear in your city now --the neighbors, the shops, the roads, the traffic-- all of it somehow gone and rediscovered by another civilization who decides to use much of it as only a foundation and to start anew, building new roads and buildings and homes over what once was your city, and to basically bury any trace of you; and then to have that done over and over and over with each new civilization that arrives. Well, it will never happen we think, for we are far too advanced and populous and established; certainly not a city as large as ours we think...but probably those were the same thoughts that each earlier civilization felt, even as they discovered cities before them, the bricks and layers worn away to almost nothing, the past nearly erased. Pompeii** is perhaps just a blip in history, a clue as to what comes and goes so easily.
Another interesting few points emerged from the lectures (of which I'm only 2/3 through the 24 talks), is to not give up hope. One of the "most important archeological discoveries of all times," says Professor Cline, was Uluburun. Wait, what?? As great as the Rosetta Stone and the tombs inside the Pyramids? And here's something even better -- Uluburun was only discovered in 1982 and by a young sponge diver in his first year of diving. So don't give up...our past has yet to be uncovered. It's all there, the fact that the Dead Sea Scrolls were found by a boy throwing rocks high into the holes in the cliffs above him in 1947; one rock hit a piece of pottery and he heard the pieces shatter. Some of the original leather scrolls were sold to a shoemaker who also dealt in antiquities; had he not been able to re-sell the Scrolls he likely figured he could at least use the leather to make additional sandals or shoes (other scrolls were later advertised for sale in the Wall Street Journal). But that was just one cave, for many more were to be uncovered (and perhaps many more yet to be found), one cave having not leather scrolls but a scroll of copper which had to be cut into sheets in order to be removed...it contained a treasure map of sorts, detailing 64 sites where hundreds of ingots of gold and such were hidden. Not one of the treasures has yet to be discovered (you can go online to read the scrolls). Masada, Atlantis, Knossos, Megiddo (Biblical site of Armageddon?)...and those cities are just what's being uncovered in the Middle East. What other vast cities or civilizations await in other parts of the world? Or in the oceans?
What's been interesting as well is that the more archeologists uncover, the more our history seems to change. Fabled stories such as the heroic human sacrifice made at Masada are apparently proving improbable despite the historical records we have. Which makes one wonder about some of the rest of our history. How many cities and civilizations vanished before any records were even put down; and how many records were simply destroyed and lost forever (the destruction of temples and such by ISIS is but a grim reminder of how earlier civilizations acted when "the spoils go the victor"). And how did the early explorers cultural backgrounds influence their findings and later their publications? Even such fields as archeology have progressed along the lines of forensic science and as great as some early cultural scientists were, today's archeologists aren't afraid to rectify what may have been earlier mistakes or assumptions; but would an alien culture feel the same, digging among the charred ruins of an ancient Earth, our cities buried or back down to rubble, our bones now just dust blending in with the rest of the soil. How would an alien archeological team piece together our history since everything decays. Our plastic and electronic records would have likely melted or simply eroded, our paper records burned. Perhaps all that would be found would be ancient scraps of pottery and clay tablets, records from centuries and millennia before our current culture. Even the treasured measurement of the kilogram, locked away in a triple-locked vault near Paris, (it's what is used as the go-to measurement that defines the true mass of a kilogram) was found to have become "five parts in 100 million heavier than all the working standards, which have been leaving behind a few atoms of metal every time they are put on scales."
My, this has taken on an entirely new life of its own. But it all does beg the question, where does that leave us, and by that I mean us humans in general. If our cities and records and temples and burials all fade away to nothing (as but one example, think of how few dinosaur bones are or have actually been discovered, despite their having walked the earth in prodigious numbers), then what happens to us...in the long run? Well, one thinks (as a human), what could possibly be more complex or more tightly entwined with life than us? Wheat for one (despite decoding the human genome, that of wheat has baffled scientists for over a decade and they're only now nearing the point of thinking they have 90% of it decoded)...and termites for another. And that's not even diving into the even more complex cellular world which, in some of the recent reading I've been doing, blows my all-important DNA theory back out to space. But unfortunately, as you have come to dread reading the words, this is all...to be continued.
*Lascaux, Altamira and Chauvet are likely the better known cave sites that depict early hominid drawings (some over 5 meters long) but even earlier cave discoveries such as Tabun, el-Wad and Skhul are possibly more revealing for their discoveries of human bones and showing that such caves were likely occupied for 500,000 years or more! In the Kebara cave, said Dr. Cline, archeologists found a Neanderthal skull whose throat structure revealed that it was probably capable of speech, sending our theories of human development even further back. On a side note, the flood of curious tourists (which would be most of us) have caused such extensive damage to these caves (mostly from the changes in atmosphere caused by our breaths) that all have been closed; even researchers are often limited to just a few hours in most of them and often allowed access only twice a year. Caves such as Altamira and Chauvex have been accurately recreated near the original sites (and at great cost) but now draw over twice as many visitors as the original thus still giving the rest of us a chance to glimpse part of our past.
**One interesting fact of Pompeii was the foresight of archeologist Giussepe Fiorelli. Here's how you probably picture our current view of Pompeii, as described by Dr. Cline: Excavations at Pompeii first began around 1750. Here, the ash and pumice that covered the town mixed with rain and eventually hardened into the consistency of cement, encasing hundreds of bodies. Over time, the flesh and inner organs of each body decayed slowly, forming hollow cavities in the ash in the shape of the body that had once been buried there. So imagine that you're digging through this "concrete" and really aren't expecting to find any human remains, but you do come across an empty hole every now and then. In 1863, Fiorelli told his workers to pour plaster into the holes and to see what emerged. It was only because of this that we now have dimensional representations of some of the citizenry "frozen" in time. Later sites have poured the more expensive resin into such cavities, thus allowing them to view "through" the bodies and see what may have been preserved inside their stomachs and such.
The digging part is from an interesting series of lectures by archeologist, Dr. Eric H. Cline. Listening to his talks one can only be humbled by the excavations of the past, some digs uncovering city after city, each atop one another (sometimes 20 or more!). Excavating the city of Troy in Turkey (the debate is whether Homer's epic poem depicted history or simply his imagination) uncovered no less than 9 cities, each stacked or rebuilt on top of one another. There was also news from Stonehenge (which is now believed to have once been a complete circle) with the nearby discovery of Superhenge: Most exciting is that they have also found another megalithic monument that is less than 2 miles from Stonehenge and probably dates to about the same time, that is, 4,500 years ago...It consists of more than 50 giant stones that formed a large C-shaped enclosure. The stones are each about 10 to 15 feet long and about 5 feet wide. All of them are buried horizontally, rather than standing upright, and are about 3 feet below the surface, which is why they hadn’t been spotted before. It is only through remote-sensing techniques that they have now been discovered and recorded. Somewhat similar stone structures have been uncovered in Egypt (30 so far but more are expected), each stone carved with figures of animals such as scorpions and lizards and some stones as large as 16 feet across; but what's most interesting is that these stones are so far proving to be twice as old as Stonehenge and all from a period before carving, etching, and moving tools were thought to have been invented. So where did we come from?
To answer that right off the bat, I'll deny everything...I don't have the answer, the credentials, or the theories. As to where we are going, I always tell everyone that there's only one certainty and that is that we will all find out (likely me sooner than you, dear reader). What's most interesting to me about these archeological digs however is that few traces of human bones remain. Pottery, once it was invented, is evident in shards here and there, as are many drawings*...but bones, not so much. Perhaps it is because our bones are different than most, their interior featuring a web of cell-producing marrow to produce our life-giving red blood cells (elephants bones are solid and have no such structure, something physically necessary for supporting their weight). Or perhaps the calcified composition of our bones is simply too weak to withstand the ravages of the weather or chemicals in the soils. But in dig after dig, human bones rarely appear in many of the excavations of early sites (and we're talking centuries and older here). And when hearing about the reconstruction of cities directly on top of other cities, one has to wonder about the passage of time and how fleeting it must all be. Imagine picturing everything you hold dear in your city now --the neighbors, the shops, the roads, the traffic-- all of it somehow gone and rediscovered by another civilization who decides to use much of it as only a foundation and to start anew, building new roads and buildings and homes over what once was your city, and to basically bury any trace of you; and then to have that done over and over and over with each new civilization that arrives. Well, it will never happen we think, for we are far too advanced and populous and established; certainly not a city as large as ours we think...but probably those were the same thoughts that each earlier civilization felt, even as they discovered cities before them, the bricks and layers worn away to almost nothing, the past nearly erased. Pompeii** is perhaps just a blip in history, a clue as to what comes and goes so easily.
Another interesting few points emerged from the lectures (of which I'm only 2/3 through the 24 talks), is to not give up hope. One of the "most important archeological discoveries of all times," says Professor Cline, was Uluburun. Wait, what?? As great as the Rosetta Stone and the tombs inside the Pyramids? And here's something even better -- Uluburun was only discovered in 1982 and by a young sponge diver in his first year of diving. So don't give up...our past has yet to be uncovered. It's all there, the fact that the Dead Sea Scrolls were found by a boy throwing rocks high into the holes in the cliffs above him in 1947; one rock hit a piece of pottery and he heard the pieces shatter. Some of the original leather scrolls were sold to a shoemaker who also dealt in antiquities; had he not been able to re-sell the Scrolls he likely figured he could at least use the leather to make additional sandals or shoes (other scrolls were later advertised for sale in the Wall Street Journal). But that was just one cave, for many more were to be uncovered (and perhaps many more yet to be found), one cave having not leather scrolls but a scroll of copper which had to be cut into sheets in order to be removed...it contained a treasure map of sorts, detailing 64 sites where hundreds of ingots of gold and such were hidden. Not one of the treasures has yet to be discovered (you can go online to read the scrolls). Masada, Atlantis, Knossos, Megiddo (Biblical site of Armageddon?)...and those cities are just what's being uncovered in the Middle East. What other vast cities or civilizations await in other parts of the world? Or in the oceans?
What's been interesting as well is that the more archeologists uncover, the more our history seems to change. Fabled stories such as the heroic human sacrifice made at Masada are apparently proving improbable despite the historical records we have. Which makes one wonder about some of the rest of our history. How many cities and civilizations vanished before any records were even put down; and how many records were simply destroyed and lost forever (the destruction of temples and such by ISIS is but a grim reminder of how earlier civilizations acted when "the spoils go the victor"). And how did the early explorers cultural backgrounds influence their findings and later their publications? Even such fields as archeology have progressed along the lines of forensic science and as great as some early cultural scientists were, today's archeologists aren't afraid to rectify what may have been earlier mistakes or assumptions; but would an alien culture feel the same, digging among the charred ruins of an ancient Earth, our cities buried or back down to rubble, our bones now just dust blending in with the rest of the soil. How would an alien archeological team piece together our history since everything decays. Our plastic and electronic records would have likely melted or simply eroded, our paper records burned. Perhaps all that would be found would be ancient scraps of pottery and clay tablets, records from centuries and millennia before our current culture. Even the treasured measurement of the kilogram, locked away in a triple-locked vault near Paris, (it's what is used as the go-to measurement that defines the true mass of a kilogram) was found to have become "five parts in 100 million heavier than all the working standards, which have been leaving behind a few atoms of metal every time they are put on scales."
My, this has taken on an entirely new life of its own. But it all does beg the question, where does that leave us, and by that I mean us humans in general. If our cities and records and temples and burials all fade away to nothing (as but one example, think of how few dinosaur bones are or have actually been discovered, despite their having walked the earth in prodigious numbers), then what happens to us...in the long run? Well, one thinks (as a human), what could possibly be more complex or more tightly entwined with life than us? Wheat for one (despite decoding the human genome, that of wheat has baffled scientists for over a decade and they're only now nearing the point of thinking they have 90% of it decoded)...and termites for another. And that's not even diving into the even more complex cellular world which, in some of the recent reading I've been doing, blows my all-important DNA theory back out to space. But unfortunately, as you have come to dread reading the words, this is all...to be continued.
*Lascaux, Altamira and Chauvet are likely the better known cave sites that depict early hominid drawings (some over 5 meters long) but even earlier cave discoveries such as Tabun, el-Wad and Skhul are possibly more revealing for their discoveries of human bones and showing that such caves were likely occupied for 500,000 years or more! In the Kebara cave, said Dr. Cline, archeologists found a Neanderthal skull whose throat structure revealed that it was probably capable of speech, sending our theories of human development even further back. On a side note, the flood of curious tourists (which would be most of us) have caused such extensive damage to these caves (mostly from the changes in atmosphere caused by our breaths) that all have been closed; even researchers are often limited to just a few hours in most of them and often allowed access only twice a year. Caves such as Altamira and Chauvex have been accurately recreated near the original sites (and at great cost) but now draw over twice as many visitors as the original thus still giving the rest of us a chance to glimpse part of our past.
**One interesting fact of Pompeii was the foresight of archeologist Giussepe Fiorelli. Here's how you probably picture our current view of Pompeii, as described by Dr. Cline: Excavations at Pompeii first began around 1750. Here, the ash and pumice that covered the town mixed with rain and eventually hardened into the consistency of cement, encasing hundreds of bodies. Over time, the flesh and inner organs of each body decayed slowly, forming hollow cavities in the ash in the shape of the body that had once been buried there. So imagine that you're digging through this "concrete" and really aren't expecting to find any human remains, but you do come across an empty hole every now and then. In 1863, Fiorelli told his workers to pour plaster into the holes and to see what emerged. It was only because of this that we now have dimensional representations of some of the citizenry "frozen" in time. Later sites have poured the more expensive resin into such cavities, thus allowing them to view "through" the bodies and see what may have been preserved inside their stomachs and such.
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