Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

In attempting to understand who we are, every human culture has invented a corpus of myth. The contradictions within us are ascribed to a struggle between contending but equally matched deities; or to an imperfect Creator; or, paradoxically, to a rebellious angel and the Almighty; or to the even more unequal struggle between an omnipotent being and disobedient humans. There have also been those who hold that the gods have nothing to do with it. One of them, Nanrei Kobori, late Abbot of the Temple of the Shining Dragon, a Buddhist sanctuary in Kyoto, said to usGod is an invention of Man. So the nature of God is only a shallow mystery. The deep mystery is the nature of Man.

Had life and humans first come to be hundreds or even thousands of years ago, we might know most of what’s important about our past. There might be very little of significance about our history that’s hidden from us. Our reach might extend easily to the beginning. But instead, our species is hundreds of thousands of years old, the genus Homo millions of years old, primates tens of millions of years old, mammals over 200 million years old, and life about 4 billion years old. Our written records carry us only a millionth of the way back to the origin of life. Our beginnings, the key events in our early development, are not readily accessible to us. No firsthand accounts have come down to us. They cannot be found in living memory or in the annals of our species. Our time-depth is pathetically, disturbingly shallow. The overwhelming majority of our ancestors are wholly unknown to us They have no names, no faces, no foibles. No family anecdotes attach to them. They are unreclaimable, lost to us forever. We don’t know them from Adam. If an ancestor of yours of a hundred generations ago—never mind a thousand or ten thousand—came up to you on the street with open arms, or just tapped you on the shoulder, would you return the greeting? Would you call the authorities?

We ourselves, the writers of this book, have so short a reach into our family histories that we can peer clearly only two generations back, dimly three, and almost not at all beyond that. We do not know even the names—much less the occupations, countries of origin, or personal histories—of our great-great-grandparents. Most people on Earth, we think, are similarly isolated in time. For most of us, no records have preserved the memories of our ancestors of even a few generations back.

A vast chain of beings, human and nonhuman, connects each of us with our earliest predecessors Only the most recent links are illuminated by the feeble searchlight of living memory. All the others are plunged into varying degrees of darkness, more impenetrable the farther from us they are in time. Even those fortunate families who have managed to keep meticulous records range no more than a few dozen generations into the past. And yet a hundred thousand generations ago our ancestors were still recognizably human, and ages of geological time stretch back before them. For most of us, the searchlight progresses forward as the generations do, and as the new ones are born, information about the old ones is lost. We are cut off from our past, separated from our origins, not through some amnesia or lobotomy, but because of the brevity of our lives and the immense, unfathomed vistas of time that separate us from our coming to be.

We humans are like a newborn baby left on a doorstep, with no note explaining who it is, where it came from, what hereditary cargo of attributes and disabilities it might be carrying, or who its antecedents might be. We long to see the orphan’s file.

Repeatedly, in many cultures, we invented reassuring fantasies about our parents—about how much they loved us, about how heroic and larger than life they were.³ As orphans do, we sometimes blamed ourselves for having been abandoned. It must have been our fault. We were too sinful, perhaps, or morally incorrigible. Insecure, we clung to these stories, imposing the strictest penalties on any who dared to doubt them. It was better than nothing, better than admitting our ignorance of our own origins, better than acknowledging that we had been left naked and helpless, a foundling on a doorstep.

As the infant is said to feel it is the center of its Universe, so we were once sure, not just of our central position, but that the Universe was made for us. This old, comfortable conceit, this safe view of the world has been crumbling for five centuries. The more we understood of how the world is put together, the less we needed to invoke a God or gods, and the more remote in time and causality any divine intervention had to be. The cost of coming of age is giving up the security blanket. Adolescence is a roller coaster ride.