⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

“Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

PAMPHLET NUMBER THREE: “HUMAN”

A human being is one of a large group of known animals (and a much larger group of unknown animals) of the genus Homo. All human species are extinct except one: Homo sapiens. Everybody reading this pamphlet is presumed to be a member of this species at the time of writing.

THE EXTEMPORANEUM

Homo Sapiens

I just finished reading a book called Sapiens, which chronicles the history of our species of human. We are not the only humans to have walked on the earth — here’s a list of seven of others, a mere sampling of the probable dozens of our cousins who died before we got to know them. We are unique among them simply because we survived.

Why we survived is a puzzle of history, but there are tons of theories, most of which agree on the how, if not the why. About 40,000 years ago, humans experienced a cognitive revolution, a fancy term for a simple idea: ideas. You can read more about that at the link, but the basic explanation for human domination of the globe can be illustrated with a line.

Most species on the earth follow a straight line. They occupy their ecosystems and fall into a temporary equilibrium with the world around them until some external force knocks the ecosystem around and they survive or die off. It’s a predictable trajectory. It’s how life happened and keeps happening.

Homo sapiens were like that, too, for a hundred thousand years, until the cognitive revolution. Our straight line started zigging and zagging. We developed complex ideas and languages to communicate them. We developed cultures and religions and ideas like trade and currency. We started cooperating in larger numbers. Rather than adapt to our environment, we changed it.

Neanderthals, as a contrast, occupied Europe for at least a hundred thousand years and had no such zigging or zagging. They showed signs of rudimentary ritual practices and had access to fire, were much more suited to their environment than human beings, yet they became extinct while human beings thrived. For many years (and, in some cases, still today), scientific consensus was that humans had killed them off. This is consistent with human behavior.

Humans didn’t kill off everything, but most things didn’t survive us. If it was big and meaty, we killed it and ate it. If it was big and dangerous, we killed it and probably tried to eat it, too. Human migration around the world can be traced by mass extinctions of megafauna (a fancy term for big animals). Where people went, the giant sloths and woolly mammoths died.

But humans shared Europe with neanderthals for five thousand years, and there were a lot fewer of them than there were of us. If we had wanted to kill them, the neanderthals would have been dead. The prevailing theory now is that we probably made love to them, instead.

I find it comforting and inspiring that our ancestors didn’t slaughter every other human species. In all probability, we worked together, lived together. We only know this happened with neanderthals because we decoded their genome, and we can see their genes buried in our own DNA. Who knows how many other species of human we shared and cooperated with? We didn’t kill them, we carried them with us into the future.

My Genes

I have 268 neanderthal variants in my genes. Here’s what my chromosomes look like, with the Neanderthal variants are in blue:

Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had a common ancestor, and then came back together in Europe for a few thousand years. Modern Homo sapiens with a 100% European lineage, like me, all have Neanderthal DNA in them, but I have relatively little (I’m in the 30th percentile or so). How do I know that I’m 100% European?

I filled a little vial with my spit and mailed it to 23andMe and in a few months I found out that nobody on earth is more white than me:

These results are only accurate to about 500 years ago, and confirms what we Foremans already knew about ourselves (though it’s mostly my mother’s side — the Hazletts — that we know about, thanks to extensive genealogical research by my more recent ancestors). These results have no affect on my life at all, since I already knew what I was and where my people came from. There were no surprises in my genome, no secret dalliances with Persian princes (or Greek peasants, for that matter). I’m a little disappointed that my family history is an arrow-straight line from one corner of one continent to me, but that’s preferable to not having a line at all.

End of Line

I want this newsletter to be 75% informational and 25% personal, so indulge me: I don’t know if my line ends with me, and I’m not sure I mind either way.

My parents had six children, so it’s not as if the venerable Foreman line will end with our generation. My brothers and sister are breeding and they’re doing a great job with it. I have no illusions about the feeling of immortality often cited in making decedents. There’s no immortality to be had for us, and that’s okay.

Indulge me this, too: what was the first name of your great-grandfather? Do you know your grandmother’s middle name? These are things that can be found in public records, so no bonus points for finding out later. More to my point, do you know what your grandmother’s friends called her when she was little? Do you know what her favorite color was? What was her first crush like? How did your grandfather feel when he got his first job? These things are accessible, if they’re still alive or anybody currently alive ever asked them, but good luck answering those questions for your great-grandparents and don’t even bother with the great-greats. Even if that data was accessible, would you read it? Would you read all of the autobiographies of all of your great-great grandfathers? Be honest.

Unless you happen to be particularly noteworthy, you won’t be remembered for very long past your death. Did you write a book? It’ll go out of print. It’ll join a vast store of digital copies of books written by hundreds of thousands of people, likely so similar to others of its kind that nobody will read it. Did you paint a famous painting? If it’s in a national gallery or famous collection, maybe somebody will see it again. Were you ever such a famous movie star that you dominated an entire genre for decades and everybody in the country knew you by name, like William Hart? Good luck finding someone who knows him now. Another fun game is to ask a teenager to name more than one Beatle.

Imagine the burden of our information on our descendants. The autobiographies of their ancestors won’t be theoretical, they will be key-word searchable and accessible from anywhere on earth. And they’ll be exhaustively complete. We wonder what our great-great grandparents did for a living? Our great-great grandchildren will know who our friends were (Facebook), who we dated (Match, Okcupid), where we went (4square, Yelp) and have insight into our most intimate thoughts (email, blogs). More information is better, but when is it too much?

THE RECOMMENDATAE

Thinking about my descendants is a bit theoretical at this point in my life, as I sit alone in a coffee shop, single and loving the voluntary seclusion of living alone, kids aren’t near the top of my priorities list. Love and marriage are the standard western human precursors to kids, and my favorite love songs are not about the fire of lust but the warmth of comfortable domesticity. The gold standard of that kind of love song is This Must Be the Place by Talking Heads. If you know me and you know the same kind of music, then you already know about that, so what’s the point in a recommendation? Instead, I’ll recommend this video for a live version of another favorite Talking Heads song, Houses in Motion — this one has bonus choreography and Canadians wearing wigs:

THE ANECDOTUS

I first fully became aware of my species during early adolescence, but not for the reasons that implies. I grew up in the homogenous neighborhoods of suburban West Virginia. From kindergarten to high school, there was one black student in my class (though not the same one throughout). I did three things in that period of my life: 1) watched tv 2) stayed up late 3) wrote stories. Every Saturday night, after SNL, WTOV played Star Trek episodes.

Star Trek informed my idea of what it meant to be human, contrasting our species with others. To me, different races were Klingons and Romulans, not dark-skinned humans. There was no racism in our household. The topic was rarely even discussed. There’s some kind of privilege in that, but I think it helped me rather than hurt.

ADDENDUM APPROPRIATUS

We’re still finding little secrets in our genes, and I’m happy to report evidence that supports my thesis that humans cooperated with, and loved, strangers they encountered: a new non-sapiens human relative found in our genes.

thank you for reading, fellow human