Further... (more backgrounding)

As our early human forebears wandered ever further from Africa and began making new homes in new environments, learning new ways from the places they settled and raising children, they developed entire cultures and new languages. Their bodies may have dissolved into the soil but their heritage still whispers to us through the languages we use to talk to each other today.

 At the start of the 21st century, about 6,900 languages were known to exist in the world, though linguists were expecting that as many as half of them could die out by the century’s end. With them, will be sliced away whole dimensions of human experience and portions of humanity’s collective history and wisdom. Culturally, we’re losing diversity. And “we” is a word to remember.

Each of us has two biological parents. So we each have four grandparents, and eight great grandparents. Every generation, the number of our ancestors doubles: after eight generations, we are looking at more than 1,000 ancestors. After 20 generations, we hit a million. By the time we get back 30 generations, a mere 600-700 years or so, we enter periods in which we have more than 500 million potential ancestors: and that’s more than the world’s estimated total human population. (The United States Census Bureau’s published estimates of the world population in the 14th century range around 350-450 million. The United Nations’ estimate for 1250 is 400 million people worldwide.)

 What this means, of course, is that lines of descent have repeated themselves, frequently, within cultural groups — “we” are all related and “we” are all in-bred — but, despite the inbreeding and the genetic boundaries that have affected us at different times in human history, and the explosion of the human population over the past few hundred years, no two people are identical. Each of the planet’s nearly seven billion people is unique.

As a child, I loved poring over the family Atlas. Friday nights were family “library nights”. So, I’d pick a place I’d never heard named or imagined before and then, on library night, while my parents browsed the fiction shelves for week’s reading, I’d go to the reference section and bother the librarians to try to find out about the place I’d chosen… and the little dot in the Atlas would turn into, say, busy industrial Barysaw in Belarus with a population of around 150,000 people, home to the widely unheard-of world record-breaking weightlifter called Anatoly Chubais. And there was Machala in south-west Ecuador, the self-styled “Banana Capital of the World” — I really liked bananas — with more than quarter of a million people: families and individuals with joys and worries, hopes and satisfactions, who were getting up every morning and going about their day in ways I’d couldn’t visualise. And not one of them would have heard of me, or even of my ‘dad’. But I could imagine the smell of all of those bananas. Oddly, I can’t remember an impatient or unhelpful librarian but they must have trembled to see me turn up on Friday evenings. Nowadays, the Internet makes it all a lot easier.

Then I heard about the fascinating notion of “six degrees of separation”: the idea that between you and any other person in any place on Earth lie only six people, each of whose acquaintances include someone who can direct you on to the next contact in the chain. The kaleidoscopic diversity that’s waiting to be explored and experienced within this one species we call humanity is not only wonderful and fascinating, it’s also interconnected with awe-inspiring intimacy in ways that we can begin to explore on nothing more than a whim …and a little more than our own curiosity.

Curiosity! Now THERE’s an emotion to give rein to, and cram a lifetime with delight.