What a wonderful world, isn’t it? And we’re in pretty good shape, don’t you think?
Life on Earth is somewhere in the region of 4 billion years old. According to the experts, single celled molecules first evolved a nucleus around 2 billion years ago.
Vertebrates? Around half a billion years old. And mammals? We’ve been birthing live young for over 220 million years.
Eventually came the supra primates, something like 50 million years ago. And not too far behind them, the primates. From little monkeys evolved bigger apes. Then roughly 15 million years ago, naked, forest dwelling and fruit eating, our most ancient of ancestors, the Great Apes slowly emerged to dominate the tree tops.
The fossil records say we’re little more than peculiar African apes, 98 per cent genetically identical with chimps, our closest living relatives. And for most of our extended family, not much has changed. Still naked. Still forest dwelling. Still fruit eating.
So how did we get here, teetering on the very precipice of time, boldly going where no ape has gone before, in 2012 and beyond? What makes you so different from a chimp? How exactly did we become Super Apes?
This is something of grey area. For one reason or another, around 6 million years ago, some of us began walking on our hind legs, freeing our hands and opening our minds. Maybe a drier climate shrank the dense forests of our long forgotten but romantically imagined Golden Age. Maybe we evolved to gather low hanging fruit, or reduce our exposure to sunlight. We don’t know for sure, and we most likely never will.
What we do know is that somewhere in the region of between three and one million years ago, humans quite unpredictably evolved enormous brains, strong jaws for root chewing and then incisors for meat eating. We crafted increasingly complex tools and learned to survive by working cooperatively, beginning to protect ourselves from predators collectively as our natural defences weakened.
Interestingly, the infamous Mayan calendar, which calculates the age of our universe with unerring accuracy as somewhere in the region of 16 and half billion years, and which foretells our ascension to cosmic consciousness in late 2012, also predicts this transition from the bestial family to the more recognisably human tribe, around 2 million years ago. But that isn’t the point of this most fiercely pointed monologue. If you’re wondering about the point, just relax. We’ll get to the point later.
So where were we?
Mighty Homo Erectus wandered out of Africa, harnessed fire and constructed shelters, in the first great wave of early human migration. Later, as little as 200,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens emerged and slowly crossed the continents, perhaps competing or even hybridising with Europe’s Neanderthals, which were eventually driven to extinction, a mere 28,000 years ago.
And what of modern man? Where do Adam and Eve fit in? Remarkably, it’s quite plausible that all modern humans evolved from a single African Eve, with male Y chromosome DNA hinting at a similar possibility.
Some of us wandered to Asia, probably around 90,000 thousand years ago, others to Australia around 60,000 years ago. We meandered, almost haphazardly, into Europe only 40,000 years ago and the Americas less than 20,000 years ago.
So after hundreds of millions of years of evolution, from complex single celled organisms to vertebrates and mammals and finally, our modern day biological form, we explored and settled in each corner of the earth in less than 80,000 years. Mind you, that’s quite a long time, isn’t it?
Yes. A thousand human lifespans is, quite literally, ages. And as far as us Super Apes are concerned, that was simply the end of the beginning.
Because 30,000 years ago, human civilisation dawned. Technology, art and culture developed rapidly, perhaps due to advances in communication and our use of language, or perhaps changes in the ways in which we control our patterns of thought. Then only 10,000 years ago, early human cultures began cultivating crops and domesticating animals. In ancient Mesopotamia came our earliest major settlements, or at least the earliest ones our dominant paradigm is willing to concede, only 4,000 years ago.
And from here we know the story, right?
With the Greeks, empirical rationalism triumphed over spiritual mysticism. The trajectory of our intensely analytical, scientifically reasoned and dominantly masculine modern paradigm was gradually defined. And with the rapid spread of Christianity, a monotheism emerging from a marginal Hebraic tradition barely 2,000 years ago to dominate Europe’s now significantly evolved civilisation, timeless mythologies became obscured. Following a comparatively swift Dark Ages, and less then 300 years ago, we arrived with a bump into modernity. The enlightenment established scientific rationalism as the Western world’s dominant pseudo religious faith, and fuelled by the industrial revolution’s rapid technological advance and an increasingly intensive mining of fossilised sunlight, civilisation spawned capitalism.
And so here we are. All soon to be 9,000,000,000 of us. Oh of course, the population spike. We haven’t quite finished yet.
Estimates mostly agree that human populations bottlenecked following Tuba’s super volcanic eruption, around 70,000 years ago in Sumatra, perhaps reduced to as few as a single thousand breeding pairs. Until the dawn of agriculture, global populations were mostly steady, with around one million early and modern humans sharing the biosphere. The Black Plague pandemic reduced world populations by around 100 million between 1340 and 1400 AD, with Europe not fully recovering for nearly 200 years. Small advances in European and Asian populations were supported by the cultivation of American crops like maize, while Old World diseases and a particularly violent flourish of systematic genocide shrank Native American populations by around ninety per cent within a single generation.
So when and where did we all come from? Well, our global population has advanced by over 2,000 per cent in less than four human lifespans. How on earth did that happen? Not so much on earth, more like from earth. This dramatic and ever accelerating population explosion was fuelled by agricultural and industrial revolutions, the exploitation of cheap energy photosynthesised then fossilised over thousands of millions of years, and major advances in Western medicine and sanitation, correcting the imbalances and, consequently, diseases which have become pervasive within our brief and mostly unconscious ‘civilisation.’
And that folks, is pretty much the size of it.
Our dominant culture has alienated us from the natural world which sustains us, while our industry pollutes our water, our soil, our air and, perhaps most nonsensical of all, ourselves. We have mindlessly corrupted our most precious genetic inheritance, privileging our mind’s rationalism over it’s capacity for intuition, and further reducing that rationalism to a succession of narrow dogmas, currently dictated by the all pervasive profit motive of a runaway economic juggernaut: a model which has consumed us, as we consume the Earth; which dominates our lives as we dominate the lives of all animate and inanimate beings.
To briefly recap, and rather crudely abbreviate:
In evolution’s finest achievement, humans evolved from complex single cell organisms, through vertebrates and primates to become Kings of the Swingers, the jungle VIP, greatest of the Great Apes. As our minds grew stronger and our gait straightened we climbed down from the trees of our primordial African paradise and wandered the Earth, evolving tools, experimenting with various plant substances, occasionally benefiting immeasurably from the mind altering effects of powerful psycho actives, and hunting wild beasts. We evolved a capacity for language and living collectively, and civilisation slowly dawned. We domesticated our fellow animals, as well as our fellow gender, and cultivated the soil, with subsequent divisions and dependencies emerging between our rural and urban environments. We specialised our toil, and engineered time to contemplate the meaning of our existence, as well as technologies which advanced our understanding of how and why we exist, and we began to dig precious things from the land. This transformed our capacity to live in comfort and material abundance, and fuelled our curious determination to spread our civilisation through every corner of the world, driven by a somewhat futile hungering to expose every mystery and subdue every magic to the cold reason and radical simplification of our singularly privileged, and remarkably well insulated, rational mode of knowing.
Somewhere along this cosmic journey, we began to exercise power over one another, as young and old, strong and weak or male and female; a domination of fellow beings which is symptomatic of an imbalance within ourselves. And as these hierarchies of power grew more entrenched as social conventions became established, they subsumed the natural world to a similar relationship of dominion.
And so here we are, living everywhere at the expense of almost every other thing, disconnected and disorientated, in early 2012. But we remain, unarguably, Super Apes. In fact, somewhere in South America, many thousands of years ago, a tremendously sophisticated civilisation with a peerless knowledge of the heavens above, calculated that deep in the distant future, this date would symbolise the end of a long cosmic cycle, and perhaps even the end of time itself. Which is, in every sense of the word, quite extraordinary, don’t you think?
We should perhaps recall that time is a construct which exists only in our imagination, helping us to order and structure the relative world which we experience subjectively through continual mediation with our senses. Like so much of our material ‘reality,’ it is created by us, sustained by us, and exists only through our relationships with the world and each other.
Here, perhaps, is an opportunity to remember the origin of our species, and contemplate again the magic and the mystery of our existence. As we witness in horrified denial the collapse of civilisation, we might instead choose to recollect that this is a world which we alone have created. Every pollutant, every bankruptcy, every conception of ‘death’ or ‘disease’ or ‘waste’ is a concept evolved by our consciousness, transformed by our language and anointed significance only by virtue of the meaning with which it is endowed.
But we must not despair. Remember, we are all Super Apes.
And just as we have created the lifeless, so too may we assist in it’s decay. Withdrawing for a moment from the mind numbing merry go round of modernity, we should observe that just as nature exists in a continual cycle of creation, growth and decay, so too does our species and its elaborately conceived culture.
Which surely isn’t much of a surprise. If we aren’t nature, then what do we presume we might be? Where do we imagine we might have come from? Where do we consider we might end up? Isn’t it a touch indulgent to dismiss ‘primitive’ notions of Mother Nature, when nature is precisely where every one of our ancestral mothers now reside, their bodies animated by birds, or preserved patiently in stasis by the miracle of geology?
We are nothing if not animals, and we should proudly uphold our long evolutionary tradition as Super Apes. We exist at the jagged pinnacle of life’s creaturely potential, capable of astonishing feats of conscious creation; uniquely privileged to participate joyfully and graciously in the timeless, infinite and absolute ebb and flow of all relativity.
Folks, we are nothing if not Super Apes. But in order to honour our ancestors, we should proceed with caution.
It seems that we each possess a simple choice. As we witness our culture disintegrate before our intricately evolved eyes, we may sense a feeling of inertia born of meaning newly dislocated. And we may panic and become fearful, seeking to blame others and enact retribution, perhaps violently, and most likely by exploiting the few precious resources which remain temporarily intact.
Or we may choose to open our eyes, and shuffle blinking towards the light of our salvation. Liberated and newly awakened, we may begin to understand truth as being diverse and subjective, accepted in knowing self definition, and gradually begin to rediscover our imagination’s boundless creative potential, moving with power and freedom into the vast expanses opened wide by our culture’s sudden and comprehensive decay.
When faced with a threat to its survival, every species must make this simple but challenging choice, whether conscious or unconscious, biological, psychological, or even spiritual:
Do we evolve, or do we die?
Like it or not, you are a Super Ape. Which means this profound choice is yours to make. But first, breathe deeply. Remember your biological and cultural inheritance, and consider whether billions of years of evolution should be discarded without care or contemplation.
The situation is simply this. In 2012, we feed upon our Mother Earth as a parasite, systematically destroying the chemical composition of her atmosphere, mining her soil and polluting her oceans. Our fellow beings lie paralysed in our wake, suffocated, deforested and exploited, increasingly beyond the brink of extinction.
You may have already clicked, but we have, slowly but surely, arrived at the point of this dictate.
Super Apes, make your choice. In every moment, you have an opportunity to begin consciously creating a world that can be healed, as we slowly heal ourselves and each other, by redressing the imbalances which we continually but voluntarily accept, each and every day, whether through fear, or ignorance, or occasionally something more sinister.
In 2012, we’ve been handed a gift wrapped opportunity to refuse to be fearful, and instead to accept the ancient prophecy of the Mayan people. Here is an invitation to become newly conscious, wilfully interpreting this moment as a defining transition in our journey, from single celled organisms through stone aged hunter gatherers, all the way home to the infinity of the Absolute.
Yes, we are only human. But we’re undeniably Super Apes, perfectly capable of awakening, here and now or whenever and wherever we choose, seizing the day with each of our opposable thumbs. Do not regret that this change is long overdue, or choose to again defer it’s immanence, patiently awaiting a distant revelation.
We are here. This is now. And in the immortal words of the great, lion crowning baboon, ‘It is time.’
You are a Super Ape. Be evolution.
Ladies and gentle folk, here come the vibrations…
