What am I missing? Oh yeah the link between Empirical Evidence and Belief!
Before Darwin's theory 150 years ago Humans could be excused for believing in a magical supernatural cosmology wherein God plopped us down on the planet out of thin air....
and then in his infinite wisdom only told one f*cking guy about how his universe works...
and left that one guy in charge of letting the rest of us know about it?
Really?
That antiquated notion is simply too dangerous to be dropped in the lap of a few megalomaniacs who have proven time and time again, that they usually edit and redraft all the good bits, and abuse it as a license to impose their will upon others, and enslave them.
When our common ancestors started traipsing oot of Africa it wasn't because they were bored, or looking for an IKEA. Some climatic disaster drove them away. Which is why I refer to us as Homo Escapeons. An Eon means "age" or "forever". We've been running away from our problems for Eons.
To this day most Humans seem more concerned with where they think they are going when they die, rather than finding out how we got here. Most Earthlings are shackled by superstitious beliefs that exist without any empirical evidence...dogmas which are eventually tweaked and manipulated to justify and absolve themselves of murdering, dominating, and controlling the proverbial others.
There are no others!
The earliest Humanish predecessors (Erectus, yes it's always funny) left Africa around 1.8 million years ago. Antecessor left 800,000 ya, then Heidelbergensis (future Neanderthals?) 600,000 ya, and finally us (Sapiens-Sapiens) around 60,000 ya.
Genetic evidence suggests that every single Earthling descended from a few thousand people about 70,000 years ago. This 'bottleneck' may have been brought about by a one of the world's largest know volcanic eruptions at Lake Toba (Sumatra, Indonesia), which plunged the planet into a 6 to 10 year volcanic winter, followed by a further 1,000 year period of cooling.
We left Africa to escape a changing climate.
The oldest known anatomically modern human is aboot 160,000 years old.
Every single Earthling shares a common ancestor dubbed Mitochondrial Eve, who had genetic markers that are shared by all of us. She lived roughly 120-150 ya...
okay enough with the numbers!
Once we were oot of Africa, we were primarily Beachcombers, and eventually we made it to Australia (40,000 ya) and eventually North America. In these new places we sapiens eventually "replaced" the earlier bunch of African escapees like the Neanderthals..who had a pretty good run ..about 400,000 years twice as long as we've been around .
Zip forward tens of thousands of years and here we are...
staring at all of this hardfought data from the past few hundred years that the Religious organizations tried to stop and are still trying to stop!
Instead of accepting that we are all rellies and combining our efforts to solve our myriad of dilemmas, we refuse on the grounds that some of having an exclusivity clause with the Almighty. Most religious leaders do everything within their considerable powers to cloak shared historical information from ever reaching their adherents...for obvious reasons.
Most Earthlings are ordered to concentrate on the will of their supernatural God (to whom they claim exclusivity) so that they can escape THE END..whether THE END is their individual demise or that of the entire f*cking planet.
Prospective global terminal disasters include but are not limited to:
solar flares, supernovae, black hole explosions or mergers, gamma-ray bursts, galactic center outbursts, pollution, geological disasters, human infertility, global nuclear warfare, pandemic viral infections, all of which seem safe bets when compared to the various religious doomsday scenarios.
This gnashing of teeth is the result of watching Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in Out Of Africa. In that film Redford's character recognized that the natural world was on a collision with the Human world circa WW1.
I love the irony.
The imagery of the head-up-their-ass British Gentlemen's Club sipping G&Ts in the midst of the primal savagery and beauty of the Kenyan wilderness.
The British and German Royalty, cousins no less, have a territorial tiff to which the Gentleman merrily rush off to kill each other. Hear Hear!
We are ridiculous and we no longer have the luxury of ignoring the facts about who or what we are. It needs to stop.
Oot of Africa indeed!
I am ridiculous AND I loathe Ikea!
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