Deep Time

The September 2019 issue of the SMITHSONIAN magazine contains two articles I found especially interesting.

"The Homecoming": An ancient skeleton of an Australian aborigine is returned to his people for ceremonial reburial. This individual, known as Mungo Man, lived about 40,000 years ago, one of the oldest specimens of Homo sapiens found outside of Africa. Previously, conventional wisdom maintained that the aborigines had migrated to Australia at most 20,000 years ago. Current estimates place the arrival of human inhabitants between 47,000 and 65,000 years ago. By contrast, the earliest known Egyptian pyramid is less than 5000 years old.

"Saturn's Surprise": The water ice that makes up the rings of Saturn is raining down onto the planet, so that the rings will eventually cease to exist. They may disappear in "only" 100 million years—eons compared to the length of time anatomically modern human beings have existed, about 200,000 years, but a minute fraction of the estimated 4.5-billion-year life of the solar system.

Yet another SMITHSONIAN article delving into relative antiquity, "The New Treasures of Pompeii," reports the latest investigations of a Roman city destroyed by a volcanic eruption less than 2000 years ago, in 79 A.D. That's nothing compared to the age of Mungo Man but a long time in the perception of most Americans, for whom the 400-year-old Jamestown settlement seems ancient.

Both the article on Mungo Man and the one on Saturn highlight the vast expanses of time (contrasted with a single human life, anyway) covered by the history of our species and the unimaginably longer history of our solar system, not to mention the universe as a whole.

How would an immortal alien, or even one with a lifespan measured in millions of years, regard us? Would we be able to communicate with such an entity at all? Mark Twain, in a passage included in the posthumous collection LETTERS FROM THE EARTH, sardonically compares the lifespan of the human race in the context of the history of the cosmos to the thin layer of paint atop the Eiffel Tower, with the tower representing the age of the universe. Twain asks how we can believe ourselves to be the pinnacle of creation. That's like believing the entire tower was built for the sake of the skin of paint on the top. Maybe an incredibly long-lived species would see us that way. On the other hand, maybe a million-year-old intellect would view tiny, ephemeral creatures with compassion.

The immortal, cosmic, transdimensional entity in Stephen King's IT (the second half of the film adaptation comes out this week) finds human beings interesting enough to torture and feed on. Let's hope that if similar entities exist and we eventually meet them, they will have matured beyond a sadistic appetite for the fear and pain of lesser beings.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Early Hominids in America

Scientists have conjectured that a prehistoric site in San Diego County may prove relatives of early humans entered North America 130,000 years ago, at least 100,000 years earlier than commonly believed:

First Americans May Have Been Neanderthals

Researchers have been working on this discovery since the early 1990s. The ambiguous evidence meets with skepticism. Are the mastodon bones found at the dig evidence of human or prehuman hunters in the New World at that remote period? If so, they might not have been modern humans (Homo sapiens). They might be older members of the genus Homo such as Neanderthals or Denisovans (a distinct subspecies discovered in Siberia).

The idea of other kinds of human-like people sharing the world with us—Neanderthals, Denisovans, the Indonesian "hobbits" (Homo florensiensis)—fires the imagination. It would be like having aliens among us. An SF explanation of orcs, elves, and dwarves might be developed by postulating that those creatures were independently evolved humanoid species or subspecies. Suppose some of them lingered into historical times as the truth behind the myths? Or remnants of their kind live secretly in isolated wilderness areas to this day?

Personally, I'm holding out for the possibility that survivors of hypothetical early hominids in California form the basis of the Bigfoot legend. Why shouldn't a small breeding population of such a species continue to hide in the depths of old-growth forests? After all, mountain gorillas were discovered and identified as a separate species only in the early 20th century, and only about 800 are estimated to exist in the wild. Why couldn't other types of supposedly extinct primates have survived?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt