Rabbits, Eggs and Crucifixions

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Professor Taboo

On this Good Friday and upcoming Easter Sunday, I am reminded again of my many years of Christian fundamentalism and fervor for all things sacred and committed. Three-hundred and sixty-two days out of the year I am typically respectful and tolerant of opposing and differing world-views and faiths. But during those bygone years and Easter weekends I was utterly baffled and amazed of the hundreds, maybe thousands of followers and believers that came out of the woodwork; out of nowhere! Never before had I seen so many unrecognizable faces and families! The outfits and hats, some of them gaudy, you thought you had taken a wrong turn to the red carpet of the Oscars. On top of this awe was the fact that on this particular Sunday I and my family, as weekly members, would have to walk three-times further from our car to enter and exit our church. The parking lot and spaces were filled to capacity that would challenge even Super Bowl Sunday! What saddened me was that I would never see their faces again; maybe I would see them a year later. Maybe.

Having gone to seminary for three years, learning the New Testament inside and out, and knowing (and back then complying) what God’s holy infallible scriptures direct us to do…. there was no possible way for anyone with at least a 9th-grade reading level to not at least comprehend what our/the “Savior” was asking us to do on a daily weekly basis. As a result, Easter Sunday became one of my least favorite Sundays of the entire year. I had developed an unattractive distaste for what it had become: wayward and diluted.

Many things have now changed in my life and I’m happy to say, that in a spiritual, emotional, and mental aspect, for the better. The comical irony of those changes would makeup another post of which I will spare all of you this time. However, in the spirit of the day and holiday weekend, I will share two of my favorite 3-minute songs from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and The Life of Brian. These songs always make me smile and happy. Don’t take things too serious but enjoy your holiday weekend in whatever manner you see fit — this is my way. And with that…. Live well, Love much, Laugh often, Learn always.

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The A-C of Steampunk

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Professor Taboo

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1893 World’s Fair Chicago

The time was spring 1893 and the civilized western world was eagerly awaiting the start of the Chicago World’s Fair. For months everyone had heard of a new technology that could light up entire cities without a drop of kerosene, the flicker of flame, or choking smoke. No, it was not Thomas Edison’s light-bulbs, but Nikola Tesla’s waves of alternating currents that would illuminate the Fair’s entire neo-classical city, as if to bring back the great minds of Greece into the Victorian-era of technology. President Grover Cleveland pushed a button and thousands of incandescent lamps lit-up the fairgrounds like little full moons. The world would never be the same again. Imagine yourself in that place, at that time, and all you had known at night was the bleak shimmering glow of yellow-orange hue around you. Now you see everything under bright white beams that evaporate darkness.

What that night must have felt like — hearing all the on-looking gasps — I can only dream and sigh.

The Victorian-era was a thriving age of science, history, literature, exquisite fashion and art. And although it had its inhumanity in such things as child labor and women’s suffrage, to name two, it is the origins of remarkable discoveries in medical vaccines, anatomy, chemistry, and physics (including the first ceramic toilet) that soon made the world a little easier to bear. Today’s Steampunk is a tribute to those virtues.

The slide show below is for your modern-historical enlightenment of a few Neo-Victorian contraptions you might find at Steampunk shoppes or conventions.

Due to caption limitations of the slide viewer, I will expand a bit more here on some of the images. The Time Travel Marker is worn like a wrist watch and tracks your present locale in the time-space continuum. The Storytelling Machine is quite fascinating. You choose a marble, roll it down a shoot, and when it hits the bottom a story plays out the gramophone. It is also capable of detecting trolls. The Zoopraxiscope is an early version of blending a sewing machine, lantern, and images to produce the first prototype film projector. The Gravity Reduction Instrument reduces an object’s gravity field rendering it weightless. Dr. Evermor’s Forevertron sculpture stands 50-ft high and 120-ft wide, and transports you into any timeframe your heart desires. The Edison Bi-polar Electric Fan will convert your present neurological condition into its reciprocal by 3-minutes of inhalation…or perspiration! And the Steampunk Smartphone is the ancestor to the iPhones and Smartphones of today.

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I hope this brief post conveys to you the allure of Steampunk. I am in love with it because of my passion for history, ingenuity, science, and the brilliance of an applied mind for the greater social good. I’m an addict for its zaniness; oh what I would give to go back for a day! Every year the fashion of Steampunk blows my mind – the women’s side is pure romance – a hypnotic side for me I did not delve into this time to my heart’s disappointment. Ah, but I will soon!

Think where we might be (or not be) today had the telegraph, telephone, or AC electricity not been discovered, utilized, and perfected. You wouldn’t be reading this now. Think what we might not be listening to or dancing to had the gramophone or record player not been dabbled with and perfected. Modern America and Europe owe much of their better, healthier, educated lifestyles to the genius of Victorian doctors and scientists. Imagine if Bohr, Newton, Tesla, Einstein or Edison had not asked why over and over, or dreamt what could be and not asked why not. Imagine that we still lived in an age where we are told what to think rather than taught how to think. Steampunk is an artistic expression of that unrestraint with homage to its ancestors.

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” – Albert Einstein

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Masada, Texas: How Egos and History Repeat

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Professor Taboo

Most know where Texas is located. Many may also know where Masada is located. But everyone may not know where Masada, Texas is located. Try to pin-point Masada, Texas with your mapping software or GPS application and you will not find it. Why not? Was it wiped out from history? You will not find it because the play-on-words is a representation of thousands upon thousands of locations throughout history where the egos of one (or a few) uselessly waste the human lives of many.

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The Masada fortress

Masada is an ancient fortress in southern Israel built by Herod the Great between 37 and 31 BCE. Today it is Israel’s most popular tourist destination. Since its fall back into the hands of the Roman 10^th Legion in 73-74 CE, the fortress has become a symbol of Jewish armed rebellion against Romanesque authority or antisemitism.

The dramatic story of Masada is generally understood today from the modern post-1948 Jewish Zionist point-of-view. In other words, because of the long immense history of Semitic exiles (Diaspora) and the sacred Jewish Torah (parts of the Catholic/Protestant Old Testament) designated parts of modern-day Palestine belongs to Israelis — even those who were not born there – Jews have the God-given right and backing by the United Nations to live there. Controversial? To put it mildly, yes. It is the very reason the area has been volatile for over 64 years or more. Trying to rewrite and “correct” centuries and millennia of victorious imperialism and colonialism is often futile; exasperating at best. Though the past cannot be changed, I would like to share briefly another perspective to the Masada story, past and recent, so that we might learn from it and not continually repeat it.

Under the rule of the Roman Empire, Jewish Apocalyptic fervor in the province of Judaea was not uncommon. Not only did this hyped-up belief preach a coming Messiah to free and lead all Jews from Rome, but it also fanned the fire of the End times, or last battle/conflict between good and evil, where the “righteous” prevail with their Messianic Savior and Almighty God. Within all religions there are groups of zealots; those who are radical, active (even militant), and impatient for global change. Their impatience gluts their manipulation of prophetic scriptural passages. The Jewish Sacarii of Masada were just such a group. Interestingly enough, one historical description of Sacarii are those Jewish zealots who wield concealed daggers (today assault weapons?) against authority.

The Roman historian Josephus wrote about the siege of Masada and the Jewish Zealots like the Sacarii. Most contemporary historical scholars blame the second destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE on the militant Jewish zealots like the Sacarii. Within the sovereignty of Rome, all Jews at that time were allowed their freedom to worship and gather peacefully. But to some extremist their interpretation of Holy Scripture was all or nothing. Despite several moderate Jewish groups living peaceably in and around Jerusalem, Roman taxation and apocalyptic fanaticism were made into the proverbial straws that sparked the Sacarii rebellion. Finally, in 73 CE after decades of repressed rebellions and fatalities on both sides, Rome’s patience had worn beyond thin. Extermination was the only Roman or Jewish alternative. Or was it?

“Welcome to Masada, Texas”

Ironically, Masada sits atop a mountain plateau in Israel called Mount Carmel. With the upcoming 20^th anniversary of the Waco tragedy at the Branch Davidian Compound, it should be the umpteenth exponential reminder of how over-zealous, apocalyptic, militant, religious fanaticism uselessly killed 54 adults and 28 children. In a country that sufficiently protects the constitutional right to freedom of religion, how did this tragedy take place inside the United States?

Dick Reavis, author of “The Ashes of Waco”, gives superb objective verifiable answers to how the events of April 19, 1993 and the Branch Davidian leader Vernon Howell’s (aka David Koresh) childhood, rise within the church, Messianic lure, and manipulation probably showed the stand-off could not have ended much differently.

There are many reasons why self-proclaimed prophets of God fulfill their death-wishes and put their followers at great risk, but in David Koresh’s case two primary reasons stand out: 1) accumulation and trafficking of assault weapons, and 2) years of sexual intercourse with several female minors allowed and supported by all the adult Branch Davidian members.

There is no need to spend any time writing about the high-risk dangers and ownership of assault weapons, much less trafficking assault weapons. Newtown, Connecticut 2012, Aurora, Colorado 2012, Stockton, California 1989 and several other massacres all speak clearly on the purchase of or accumulation of assault weapons. Purchase one you will draw attention. Accumulate many and beyond doubt you deserve federal and state law enforcement monitoring or seizure; it is at that point one is not much different from Al-Qaeda. David Koresh and his Branch Davidians absolutely deserved the hyper-concerned ATF initiatives. But this was not the only issue with Koresh’s radical ideology.

Regarding sexual relations with minors, with very good reasons the federal and state laws prohibit adults engaging in intercourse, or behavior of a sexual nature, with anyone younger than 18 years of age. But aside from a legal standpoint, what moral or ethical reasons ever prove sexual intercourse or behavior (let alone births) with minors? Where, David Koresh, in your bible did it tell you it was permissible to have sex with 13, 14, and 15-year-old girls, or permissible to have sex with your male church member’s wives?

Branch Davidian children who followed Koresh to death

Read this disturbing report in the Chicago Tribune, “Branch Davidian Children Tell Of Abuse At Waco Compound“.

Aside from all the other absurdities reflected by Koresh, Branch Davidians, and all other fanatical religious groups (including Christian, Jewish, and Islamic), these two primary reasons demonstrate the applied definition of occult and egocentric. Worse still, twenty-eight young children (most of them fathered by Koresh) paid the ultimate price for one man’s delusional abuse and the naïve scared member parents and adults that let it happen.

Dr. Charles Strozier, Psychoanalyst and Professor of History at The City University of New York, has researched and taught classes on new religious movements for over twenty years. In a recent interview regarding modern new religious movements, Strozier pointed out what type of followers and leader typically form a cult versus popular movements-for-change such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s, or Mahatma Gandhi’s. Strozier states that these groups see themselves as a spiritual movement or spiritual reform outside of established traditional religion. The followers of these movements, he says is based on their “sense of dismay with traditional institutions” or traditional churches. Often fed up with institutional corruption, these followers are consoled by a rebirth of perceived purity which panders greatly to their pain, suffering, or frustration. A lot of the followers are social outcasts due to their lack of social-graces, economic level, and/or level of education to invoke their perceived urgency in change. The system or institutions appear to them as against them; i.e. a ‘my movement is right and good, yours is corrupt and bad’ mentality. It is a distressed human coping mechanism. Dr. Strozier continues:

“I would define a cult as a malevolent — usually with a paranoid delusional leader — that is totalistic, that is ingrown and completely absorbed in its own practices and functions that has the potential to become malevolent, coercive, and absolutist in the way it treats those within the group. People joining these groups are persons who are vulnerable and needy, confused, often very troubled, but who are seekers drawn to the leader because the leader offers certainty about what life is all about and [more importantly] what it should be all about. That gives a wholeness and completeness to their lives.”

When asked the question why people stay in these cults, Strozier explains:

“People are not stupid and they are not going to stay in a community that they do not find some significant rewards from being in and continuing to be in. With that said, there are sometimes those cults which can become really coercive and force people to stay. There’s a dark side because of the pervasive paranoia and the kind of mindset that governs the thinking within the community… there is the potential to move toward malevolence and violence.”

And with that final description, Dr. Strozier hits the nail on the head. If the group and leader become increasingly detached from normal society, and do not or cannot find civil methods of negotiation and compromise, history has shown time and again events usually snow-ball out of control until violence breaks out. What needs to be recognized then and in the future is to strive diligently to avoid ultimatum-absolutist language, for ALL parties concerned.

At some point, because of ultimatum-absolutist language — which unfortunately is biblically based from current apocryphal Judean-Christian passages and testaments — our protected freedom of religion must have functional limits and safety checks, or history shows that “Masada, Texas” will continue to repeat in the future. Is it no wonder so many American moderates have no real issues with removing prayer from public schools, or having “In God We Trust” removed from our coins and bills? Fanatical religion is lethal!

Whoops! Not God’s Wrath After All?

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Professor Taboo

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Aftermath of Sandy (Joel Cairo - NY Daily News) — Aftermath of Sandy (Joel Cairo – NY Daily News)

“253 Killed, $66 Billion in Damage as Hurricane Sandy rips apart Eastern coast of U.S.”

“Some 270,000 Killed by Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami.”

“90,000 Burn to Death after Mount Tambora Erupts in Indonesia.”

“Deadly Tornado Flattens Everything in Bangladesh Killing 1,300.”

“Plague Sweeps through Eurasia and Europe Killing 75-200 Million Souls.”

“Fed Up God Torches Two Cities Burning Thousands of Residents to A Crisp!”

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Of the six news headlines above which ones do you think derive from actual data and first-hand accounts? Did you choose three? Did you choose two? If you are very well read, you might have chosen all six headlines. If you are not only well read but also more reasonable, then you would have chosen only five headlines as accurate. But mixing and comparing journalism of today with ancient storytelling from then is not such a labor of futility as one might think.

Interpreting events is done through two lenses: one is subjective and influenced by the viewer’s own personal and historical experience; or two it is objective, void of the viewer’s personal experiences and opinions; which can seem unrealistic when considering human nature but not entirely out of the question. Is that it? Are there only two? I would like to add a third lens: collective. In other words, viewed and checked, as well as open for future checking, by cumulative relevant data. This third lens is an amalgamation of the previous two. For example, an expert reporter in culinary arts, an expert reporter in interior design, and an expert reporter in Danish climates and transportation all combine their experiences and expertise to give us the most fabulous arrival, dining, ambiance, and cozy evening of eating that could ever be hoped for. And it was accomplished by a collective lens.

Depending on which lens is used there are Judicious, Entertaining, or Advertising Derivatives

ProPublica is a non-profit independent news firm dedicated to providing investigative journalism in an industry that has become increasingly proliferated with opinion and corporate agendas. Their mission statement goes in part like this:

“In the best traditions of [quality] journalism in the public service, we seek to stimulate positive change…We do this in an entirely non-partisan and non-ideological manner, adhering to the strictest standards of journalistic impartiality. We won’t lobby. We won’t alley with politicians or advocacy groups. We look hard at the critical functions of business and of government… [and also] institutions…”

Such a noble mission of reporting and investigative journalism, however, that M.O. would not have been commonly understood or embraced by the small group of exiled Hebrews who compiled the Torah in 2^nd and 1^st century BCE Arabia and Mesopotamia. But if you had to choose between the lenses mentioned and described earlier, which of the three lenses would you think the books of the Torah were written through? For that matter, which lens was used to scribe the entire canonical bible western civilization popularized? Pardon the following C+C Music Factory reference…

Things That Make You Go Hmmm

Most of us are familiar with the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. We may also remember that the bible story implies that every single resident was depraved and unholy. It can also be reasonably inferred that this ‘divine judgment’ included the infants and children of the two cities. What town or village, past or present, has no infants or young children? If you would like to read the entire story, the passages in Genesis read like this depending on which version you select; this link is the Mishnah Torah Code by the Mamre Institute in present-day Israel: Genesis 18:16-19:29.

Quickly paraphrasing the biblical story, Yahweh was willing to spare both cities for the sake of fifty righteous residents. However, because Lot and his family were surrounded by such moral filth and because the two visitors he was protecting from an immoral mob, Yahweh felt that Lot, his family, and His ‘chosen people’ would become too influenced by all the evil. Hence, Yahweh rescues them before raining down fire and sulfur, obliterating both cities and every single living thing in them and nearby. From these verses millions of reading and taught followers gain theology and a strict moral compass about sexuality. Oddly enough, the specific sexual act inferred from the verses is later omitted or overlooked in the Ten Commandments.

There are always three sides to every story: Yours, Mine, and the Monday Morning Newspaper

Geologists have long been puzzled by the landslide remains in the valley of Ötztal, Tirol, Austria. For centuries they had considered the cause(s) as inconclusive but possibly that something impacted the mountain due to pressure and explosion evidence. This was the commonly accepted cause of the Austrian landslide until two engineers subjected a copy of a much older Sumerian clay tablet to their cosmic-trajectory program. What followed was completely unexpected.

Path of 3123 BCE asteroid and debris area

Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell of Reaction Engines, Ltd and Bristol University respectively, created a computer program that could not only track the exact trajectory of objects in space, but can also reconstruct the exact position of stars thousands of years in the past. With this precise mathematical knowledge they were able to translate the 700 BCE Sumerian astronomer’s tablet-copy recording an event in the night sky of June 29, 3123 BCE. The tablet also notes that the object was large enough to be seen in space well before the event of June 29^th further revealing the angle of approach into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Coupled with historical geological data of asteroid impacts or airbursts of asteroids, and forensic science, many scholars find it very plausible that the debris field of the 3123 BCE asteroid blast – equivalent to ~ 20,000 times greater than the Hiroshima atomic bomb – sprayed burning sulfur and stone over the Mediterranean Sea and onto northern Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula and up to the Dead Sea (see diagram right). The Dead Sea area is generally agreed to be where the ancient towns of Sodom and Gomorrah are located.

Does this mean that myths, tales, and legends of old about an angry God or gods are creations of men’s minds to help them calm their fears of a very volatile fragile world around them? Has the recent advances of media-telecommunication technology enabled more scientists to more quickly share, collaborate, and hence collectively theorize about the data…improving the accuracy of science’s answers? Are there more of these recent scientific discoveries? Yes, I have already shared a few under the category of History, and will gladly share more in the near future.

Changing Our Lens of the World

Research and rebuttals continue about Bond and Hempsell’s findings, but the consensus is gaining favor. One particular discovery would close the case. If rock or asteroid-debris in the Levant region of the Mediterranean is confirmed to be the same rock and debris found at Köfels, Austria then there would be little left to conclude about the “cause” of Sodom and Gomorrah’s fiery end. If we apply the same cause and source of Sodom and Gomorrah’s demise to the first five news headlines above, then that says New Jersey-New York, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, and all of 14th century Europe and Eurasia, were all filthy unholy people — infants and children included — deserving of horrific death. That type of rationale seems to me very extreme; i.e. curing a headache by decapitation.

With that said perhaps mankind can start to revise, maybe overhaul their ancient beliefs in a jealous, temperamental, homicidal God that originates from only ONE region of the planet and from only a small part of Hebrew books/testaments selected from a library of many sacred Judeo scriptures. Assuming that one supreme God exists, can we really know Him from ONE book, from ONE tiny narrow lens? Liken this dilemma to a fine restaurant and you are given an abbreviated menu; one single-sided page. Around the restaurant you see other patrons reviewing menus of three two-sided pages. You must ask yourself, “How much do I really know?“

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Our Family Reunion

Posted on January 20, 2013 by Professor Taboo

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“Scientist Prove 7-Billion Earthlings All Similar!”

Quite a news headline don’t you think? But it isn’t that far off. Just as modern nuclear physics and quantum mechanics have shown that everything in existence on our planet is connected, including humans, years of DNA sampling and genetic research from around the globe increasingly shows that all of us are from the same family and same place. Indeed, socially and culturally mankind is very different all over the world. Yet much of our presumed diversity turns out to be only “skin deep.”

Human Genetics 101

The field of genetics and in particular human genetics is the study and research of inherited traits from paternal and maternal ancestors. Traits such as physical appearance are part of every human’s genetic code and are easily identifiable. However, other traits such as blood type or immunities are not so easily identified by the naked eye but can be through DNA, or genetic coding. The order of these genetic units gives a living organism, in this case a human fetus, instructions about how to be built and how to eventually operate. During the lives of a father and mother these units can evolve into mutations, or different instructions based on environmental factors such as diet and climate, as well as by external factors such as the spouse or partner and their internal and external factors during development. Over many generations these mutations become subtle or dramatic based on the ancestral story. For a more in-depth description of human genetics click here.

The Genographic Project

Primary migrations of the human race

In 2005 the National Geographic Society, IBM, and the Waitt Family Foundation, and a panel of genetic scientists led by Dr. Spencer Wells, began a monumental anthropological tracking of human migration patterns using DNA samples from over a half-million people (and rising) from over 140 countries around the world. What the project has revealed is nothing less than remarkable.

So far – and I emphasize “so far” – continued advances in DNA science and technology have shown geneticists that all mankind have evolved from mothers and fathers from southern Africa about 200,000 years ago. Then 154,000 to 134,000 years ago some began to migrate northward. This introductory map has been constructed over the last decade by geneticists Dr. Douglas C. Wallace of Yale and Cornell Universities, Dr. Peter A. Underhill and Dr. Peter J. Oefner both of Stanford University, and now continued by Dr. Spencer Wells and The Genographic Project.

Dr. Wells approaches the movement of mankind not from our distant ape/monkey ancestors of billions of years back as Charles Darwin attempted, but instead from a genealogical approach. Most of us can trace our ancestors back three, four, perhaps five generations back. However, beyond this point it becomes increasingly harder to find details about our ancestors; where they lived or moved, or how they lived. This brick wall is sometimes called the fog of history by genealogists when family specifics become sketchy and grey. Many times this is the result of catastrophic events where the record is lost or destroyed, or perhaps when wars and invasions wiped-out the population and the victors wrote their own ‘version of history.’ For example, my own particular family history – primarily my maternal history – at this point can only be traced back to the late 1700’s. We are unable to find more ancestral details due to harsh religious persecutions in central Europe at that time from which my maternal family were imprisoned or killed. Nonetheless, this isn’t a far rewind on the ancestral clock compared to what Dr. Wells and The Genographic Project have achieved.

Migrations after 7 years of DNA collections

Today the ancestral records can be tracked further back…much further back; like 40,000 years back. And due to the continuing advances in DNA research, we may soon discover much more than basic demographics of where we came from and who we belonged to. You may ask “how is that possible?” The answer is that our DNA code is a very, very long blueprint of molecular signatures; over 6-billion signatures going back to your…our earliest ancestors. Any moment when a signature changes and is passed on to a descendent this is called a genetic marker. It is from these genetic markers that geneticists like Dr. Wells have been able to trace backwards all of mankind’s migrations everywhere in the world AND where our earliest mothers and fathers originated. The above news headline would then read: We Are All Africanus-Humans! Imagine how popular or unpopular that news would be.

The Religious Sidenote

Cuneiform script from Mesopotamia

Before too many jump up and down hysterically that these genetic-DNA advances show scientific support for what the Holy Bible or other holy religious scriptures have taught for millennia, it must be clarified that the original mother and father discussed in this project were among a group of some 2,000 humans hunting and gathering together for survival. Those 2,000 were descendants of even earlier Homo erectus mammals. For the sake of simplicity for the masses, these geneticists have colloquially named the first known mother “mitochondrial Eve” and the first known father “Y chromosome Adam,” both from the 2,000 in southern Africa. These two parents should not be confused with the biblical Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden – that would be a premature jump of some length. Keep in mind that when Homo erectus on through Homo sapiens began communicating to each other verbally and with cave art, it would be another 14,000 years before writing systems took place such as chiseled tokens, sequenced pictographs, and scripted cuneiform. The Semitic alphabet (earliest forms of Hebrew) did not become widely used for another 1,400 years approximate. Therefore, to force the religious testimonies into context with the current genetic evidence, the scriptural stories are based long after the original 2,000 Y-Adams and m-Eves, and hence tell a story of only one leg (if taken literally) of many migratory legs coming from Africa some 16,000 years and 640 or more generations later! That is an unimaginable and incomprehensible amount of events and variables well beyond prehistoric human memory and perception of the time. Therefore, to say the biblical story of Eden is from a very narrow genealogical lens would be a gross understatement. It is enormously unrealistic. It simply cannot be the one and only historical source.

Back to The Genographic Project

Like it or not as it turns out, we are all from an African family. “Within the last 200,000 years” explains Dr. Wells, “we all share a common ancestor; a mitochondrial Eve, a single African woman. What’s more amazing is…the Y-chromosome Adam only lived around 60,000 years ago.” What is inferred from this genetic discovery is that up until 60,000 years ago all of mankind resided on the African continent. It wasn’t until after this time that a subgroup migrated outside the continent. Why did this subgroup decide to leave then? Why didn’t they leave sooner?

The continent of Africa has always been the most tropical continent on the planet over the past 200,000 years. Above the Tropic of Cancer and below the Tropic of Capricorn most landmasses are cooler-to-frigid climates depending on the historical time period discussed. The bulk of the other six continents do not reside inside the warmer more moderate climates of the two Tropics. About 80 percent of Africa lies within the two Tropics making it the most ideal landmass to live during an Ice Age or glaciation. The last hard glaciation started ending about 70,000 years ago (see graph below). By 50,000 years ago the polar ice-sheets were a little larger than they are today. When the warming began, Africa began to dry out and the food sources diminished. Consequently, this is the time when groups began migrating north following their food sources onto other continents. This is the time when mankind’s physical, cultural, and linguistic diversities began.

It is at this point when Dr. Wells and The Genographic Project began the journey of tracing the origins and migrations of some 560,000 individual DNA samples from around the world. The project consists of three core components:

Genetic anthropology – with the use of a GenoChip the project is able to collect 150,000 individual genetic markers revealing a person’s extensive ancestral-relevant story.
Indigenous field research – collecting and analyzing data in cooperation with groups that have remained in local or regional areas for thousands of years. This connects more dots on the human migrations map.
Collective global DNA database – invite the general population to discover their own DNA ancestry through the Geno 2.0 Kit with a portion of the proceeds going toward conservation and revitalization of indigenous projects through The Genographic Legacy Fund.

What makes this project so profoundly revolutionary are the ancestral results for all of us. It will show your incredible family lineage and show it within the context of mankind, something never imagined or done on such a personal basis. This project connects you not only to your particular ancestral makeup, but all humans to our singular African community 200,000 years ago. This has to be one of the greatest evolving stories ever told. How many questions about the origins of you and mankind will be answered? Other questions the Genographic website asks:

“How many migrations out of Africa were there? What role did the Silk Road, with its caravans and bazaars, play in dispersing genetic lineages across Eurasia? What can our genes tell us about the origins of languages? How did the great empires of history leave their genetic marks on our DNA? And if we all share such a recent common ancestry, why do we all look so different?”

The last question above is one I find most intriguing as well as enlightening. As mentioned earlier, climate has played a significant part in shaping our physical bodies. With varying climates, some extreme, come varying food sources and subsequent diets. During abundant food sources or during scarce food sources, how the group manages the sources will decide their survival. And this determination, the question of how a group will survive is a question being answered on all genetic levels. Whether it is familial, local, continental, or as a global species, the question today is always the same on every level: how will we survive together? With this in mind, the operative word in that last question above is “look”. With the advances in genetic science and the continuing work of The Genographic Project, we have learned that on a genetic level every single human being on this planet is 99% alike. It is only the 1 percent outer differences, our “looks”, our adaptive evolving physical features of survival that are different.

A New Viewpoint

Earth seen from the ISS and human space-travelers

While orbiting the Earth inside the International Space Station 250 miles up, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev said while looking down at our home planet, “from space you do not see any borders… you feel yourself part of humankind, not just man from one country or one city.” Krikalev could not be more accurate. As if from a height of incredible omniscience, Sergei points out that Earth is not a child’s sandbox to be selfishly divided and toys hoarded by the biggest bullies. On the genetic level of inner space to the orbit of outer space, mankind is really the same. What we are capable of accomplishing in collaboration with each other is now demonstrated from the molecular to the cosmos without interruption thanks in part to The Genographic Project. I recommend everyone join, after all, we are from the same miraculous yet harsh place moving on the same journeys.

The adage “hope for the best, but prepare for the worst” comes to mind. As Earth’s paleolithic record shows, our planet can be abundantly sustaining as it can be horribly unforgiving. As the most dominant intelligent species, together we can learn, respect, and grow from it, or we can fight against her and our cousins and perish. It is a simple choice with a simple answer when all the understood parts, from top to bottom, left to right, atomic to macrocosmic point to the same overture:

Our genetic blueprints and Sergei Krikalev’s recognition from space agree, we are all simply humans from the same Earth-family; nothing more, nothing less…yet a little more and a little less.

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