~ October 2006 Supplemental Page~
Honoring the Ancestors
The Elder's Eyes by
Gilbert W. Whiteduck
Your piercing eyes challenge the circle
They reveal a pride so long born,
of today they are not
Formed of secrets and pain,
they do reveal
Fear of opening the cloak of silence
Rages behind the curtains
Remembering can hurt but does it heal
The eyes are the windows of the mind
The eyes are upon me
I bow my head in a retracted humbleness
The challenge is not in the words
Eyes can not answer
Years of many moons
The strength does here lie
Your piercing eyes do challenge
Your Elder eyes have here spoken.
Roots of Human Family Tree Are
Shallow
Continued . . . But few people realize just how intricately that web
connects them not just to people living on the planet today, but to everyone
who ever lived.
With the help of a statistician, a computer scientist and a supercomputer,
Olson has calculated just how interconnected the human family tree is. You
would have to go back in time only 2,000 to 5,000 years–and probably on the
low side of that range–to find somebody who could count every person alive
today as a descendant.
Furthermore, Olson and his colleagues have found that if you go back a
little farther–about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago–everybody living today has
exactly the same set of ancestors. In other words, every person who was
alive at that time is either an ancestor to all 6 billion people living
today, or their line died out and they have no remaining descendants.
That revelation is "especially startling," statistician Jotun Hein of
England's Oxford University wrote in a commentary on the research published
by the journal Nature.
"Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person
you would have met would probably be your ancestor," Hein marveled.
It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every
Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq
is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman's family has
African roots.
How can this be?
It's simple math. Every person has two parents, four grandparents and eight
great-grandparents. Keep doubling back through the generations–16, 32, 64,
128–and within a few hundred years you have thousands of ancestors.
It's nothing more than exponential growth combined with the facts of life.
By the 15th century you've got a million ancestors. By the 13th you've got a
billion. Sometime around the 9th century–just 40 generations ago–the number
tops a trillion.
But wait. How could anybody–much less everybody–alive today have had a
trillion ancestors living during the 9th century?
The answer is, they didn't. Imagine there was a man living 1,200 years ago
whose daughter was your mother's 36th great-grandmother, and whose son was
your father's 36th great-grandfather. That would put him on two branches on
your family tree, one on your mother's side and one on your father's.
In fact, most of the people who lived 1,200 years ago appear not twice, but
thousands of times on our family trees, because there were only 200 million
people on Earth back then. Simple division–a trillion divided by 200
million–shows that on average each person back then would appear 5,000 times
on the family tree of every single individual living today.
But things are never average. Many of the people who were alive in the year
800 never had children; they don't appear on anybody's family tree.
Meanwhile, more prolific members of society would show up many more than
5,000 times on a lot of people's trees.
Keep going back in time, and there are fewer and fewer people available to
put on more and more branches of the 6.5 billion family trees of people
living today. It is mathematically inevitable that at some point, there will
be a person who appears at least once on everybody's tree.
But don't stop there; keep going back. As the number of potential ancestors
dwindles and the number of branches explodes there comes a time when every
single person on Earth is an ancestor to all of us, except the ones who
never had children or whose lines eventually died out.
And it wasn't all that long ago. When you walk through an exhibit of Ancient
Egyptian art from the time of the pyramids, everything there was very likely
created by one of your ancestors–every statue, every hieroglyph, every gold
necklace. If there is a mummy lying in the center of the room, that person
was almost certainly your ancestor, too.
It means when Muslims, Jews or Christians claim to be children of Abraham,
they are all bound to be right.
"No matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share
ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first
domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths
in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the
Great Pyramid of Khufu," Olson and his colleagues wrote in the journal
Nature.
How can they be so sure?
Seven years ago one of Olson's colleagues, a Yale University statistician
named Joseph Chang, started thinking about how to estimate when the last
common ancestor of everybody on Earth today lived. In a paper published by
the journal "dvances in Applied Probability," Chang showed that there is a
mathematical relationship between the size of a population and the number of
generations back to a common ancestor. Plugging the planet's current
population into his equation, he came up with just over 32 generations, or
about 900 years.
Chang knew that answer was wrong because it relied on some common, but
inaccurate, assumptions that population geneticists often use to simplify
difficult mathematical problems.
For example, his analysis pretended that Earth's population has always been
what it is today. It also assumed that individuals choose their mates
randomly. And each generation had to reproduce all at once.
Chang's calculations essentially treated the world like one big meet market
where any given guy was equally likely to pair up with any woman, whether
she lived in the next village or halfway around the world. Chang was fully
aware of the inaccuracy–people have to select their partners from the pool
of individuals they have actually met, unless they are entering into an
arranged marriage. But even then, they are much more likely to mate with
partners who live nearby. And that means that geography can't be ignored if
you are going to determine the relatedness of the world's population.
A few years later Chang was contacted by Olson, who had started thinking
about the world's interrelatedness while writing his book. They started
corresponding by e-mail, and soon included in their deliberations Douglas
Rohde, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist and computer
expert who now works for Google.
The researchers knew they would have to account for geography to get a
better picture of how the family tree converges as it reaches deeper into
the past. They decided to build a massive computer simulation that would
essentially re-enact the history of humanity as people were born, moved from
one place to another, reproduced and died.
Rohde created a program that put an initial population on a map of the world
at some date in the past, ranging from 7,000 to 20,000 years ago. Then the
program allowed those initial inhabitants to go about their business. He
allowed them to expand in number according to accepted estimates of past
population growth, but had to cap the expansion at 55 million people due to
computing limitations. Although unrealistic in some respects–55 million is a
lot less than the 6.5 billion people who actually live on Earth today–he
found through trial and error that the limitation did not significantly
change the outcome with regard to common ancestry.
The model also had to allow for migration based on what historians,
anthropologists and archaeologists know about how frequently past
populations moved both within and between continents. Rohde, Chang and Olson
chose a range of migration rates, from a low level where almost nobody left
their native home to a much higher one where up to 20 percent of the
population reproduced in a town other than the one where they were born, and
one person in 400 moved to a foreign country.
Allowing very little migration, Rohde's simulation produced a date of about
5,000 B.C. for humanity's most recent common ancestor. Assuming a higher,
but still realistic, migration rate produced a shockingly recent date of
around 1 A.D.
Some people even suspect that the most recent common ancestor could have
lived later than that. "A number of people have written to me making the
argument that the simulations were too conservative," Rohde said.
Migration is the key. When a people have offspring far from their
birthplaces, they essentially introduce their entire family lines into their
adopted populations, giving their immediate offspring and all who come after
them a set of ancestors from far away.
People tend to think of pre-industrial societies as places where this sort
of thing rarely happened, where virtually everyone lived and died within a
few miles of the place where they were born. But history is full of examples
that belie that notion.
Take Alexander the Great, who conquered every country between Greece and
northern India, siring two sons along the way by Persian mothers. Consider
Prince Abd Al-Rahman, son of a Syrian father and a Berber mother, who
escaped Damascus after the overthrow of his family's dynasty and started a
new one in Spain. The Vikings, the Mongols, and the Huns all traveled
thousands of miles to burn, pillage and–most pertinent to genealogical
considerations–rape more settled populations.
More peaceful people moved around as well. During the Middle Ages, the
Gypsies traveled in stages from northern India to Europe. In the New World,
the Navaho moved from western Canada to their current home in the American
Southwest. People from East Asia fanned out into the South Pacific Islands,
and Eskimos frequently traveled back and forth across the Bering Sea from
Siberia to Alaska.
"These genealogical networks, as they start spreading out they really have
the ability to get virtually everywhere," Olson said.
Though people like to think of culture, language and religion as barriers
between groups, history is full of religious conversions, intermarriages,
illegitimate births and adoptions across those lines. Some historical times
and places were especially active melting pots–medieval Spain, ancient Rome
and the Egypt of the pharaohs, for example.
"And the thing is, you only need one," said Mark Humphrys, an amateur
anthropologist and professor of computer science at Dublin City University.
One ancestral link to another cultural group among your millions of
forbears, and you share ancestors with everyone in that group. So everyone
who reproduced with somebody who was born far from their own natal
home–every sailor blown off course, every young man who set off to seek his
fortune, every woman who left home with a trader from a foreign land–as long
as they had children, they helped weave the tight web of brotherhood we all
share.
Kid’s Realm
Click
here
to download Moon Coloring Page by Willowroot.
Community Service Award
Continued . . . Miranda teaches the frame drum at various locations
throughout the Los Angeles area, such as North Hollywood, Long Beach,
Topanga, and Pasadena. In the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean, the
frame drum was used for religious functions, rites of passage, and communal
bonding. In her workshops, she teaches the hand held position, playing with
hands and fingers, the basic strokes and sounds of the drum, explores
different rhythm and stroke combinations, and weaves in the symbology and
intention behind the drum strokes.
We send our gratitude, love, support, and prayers to Miranda. This small
acknowledgment is for the large and beautiful work you have created in our
society. Truly, Miranda, the world is a better place because you are here.
The Roots of Hallow’s Eve
Continued . . . Everything has a shadow side, and Hallow's Eve and
the Winter Solstice make up the shadow side of the year. Without shadow,
light would be incomprehensible.
Cambodians call their dead to supper, "Oh, you who are our ancestors, who
are departed, deign to come and eat!" Ritual food is placed on tables in
Persia, West Africa, Sicily, Italy, and present-day Mexicans have a picnic
in the cemetery, delicacies laid out for the living and the dead alike.
Until recently, "ghost" and "guest" were pronounced the same, and both are
derived from the Germanic root, "geist".
Hallow's Eve came to America when the potato famine in 1846 forced a million
Irish immigrants to sail to our shores. It wasn't until the Eleventh Century
that Christians claimed it for their own, emphasizing All Souls Day, and All
Saints Day.
The symbols used in North America--ghost figures, masks, fires, and
food--are the same as those used thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt for
the Isia.
The Isia was a six day festival to commemorate the death of the corn God,
Osiris, even though it was named after his consort, Isis. Participants
masqueraded as Goddesses and Gods reenacting the saga of Osiris' death,
disappearance, and rebirth. Although he dies in the fall, just as the corn
is scythed, he is reborn as the springtime corn and is finally consumed as
bread, living again in those humans who consume his sacred loaves. The Isia
honored all departed souls. The Egyptians' Isia traveled to Greece and Rome,
and was most likely the beginning seed of the Celtic Samhain.
One should perform rituals for strength and commitment in order to achieve
goals set for the coming year. If the veil is thin between the living and
the dead, then most assuredly, the veil is thin between all worlds. Think
about how your life touches and interacts with various worlds, not just the
physical and emotional worlds of our friends and associates, but the worlds
of daydream, nightdream, meditation, trance, guided journeys, and individual
spirit journeys where you might travel to the Upper or Lower World.
Acknowledge the existence of All Worlds.
Hallow's Eve is a time to seek personal clarity, and also the time to think
about how to heal Mother Earth for Herself and all her children.
Reflect on your loved ones who have passed on and now know the Mysteries of
the Universe. Reflect on that which is negative that must be banished, but
also look ahead knowing the springtime will come, and those seeds lying
dormant in the cooling earth will surely sprout into green, healthy plants
to sustain us through the summer.
|