685
of a contract with Nature exists, immune to the all but overwhelming doctrine that
our lives are condemned to one side or the other of zero.
If such language reads as quintessentially vague, it must be so if it is ever to envision and effect that same Principle of Uncertainty that guides convergence and overlays in the atmosphere, the oceans, every stream, coral community, and neotropic;
all nutrient turnovers in every soil; maturations, barriers, and lack of barriers to
fertile distributions. And which uncannily works out the relational complexities,
coherence, and incoherence, marking the ecotones between those same biological
and metaphysical individuals and communities. If this vagueness is real, then all the
sciences, at some very minimum, are given a second chance, a reason for optimism
that, perhaps, there is, after all, a conceptual natural selection that favors perpetuities between the lines. The marginalia and fractions that actually add up to the biosphere just days before our arrival, a mere 0.002% of the time since the Universe
herself had come in to being.
12
There is, however, a flaw, even in that muted note of optimism that must not be
overlooked. About 300,000 to 350,000 years ago, there were nine different known
coexisting Homos, members of a largely competitive Genus, which included
H. sapiens.
13
Aside from scant evidence of meager, mutualistic, overlapping settlements and intermating, among two or three Homos, for short time frames, most
forensics indicate a strong likelihood that our species systematically wiped out any
and all competitors. Our ecological destinies were forged by tens of thousands of
years of accumulating choices and attitudes that boded of today’s dominant human
personality.
12 See “What Was It Like When The First Humans Arose On Earth?” by Ethan Siegel, Forbes, May
15, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/05/15/what-was-it-like-when-thefirst-humans-arose-on-earth/#92e098369975, Accessed July 21, 2020.
13 See “300,000 years ago, nine human species lived on Earth. Did Homo sapiens exterminate the
others?” by Nick Longrich, The Conversation, Scroll.in, November 23, 2019, https://scroll.in/
article/944558/300000-years-ago-nine-human-species-lived-on-earth-did-homo-sapiens-exterminate-the-others, Accessed July 21, 2020. In addition to our species, there were H. neanderthalensis, H. erectus, H. rhodesiensis, H. luzonensis, Asiatic Denisovans, H. naledi, H. floresiensis, and
the Chinese “red deer people”. Homo habilis, H. palaeohungaricus, H. cepranensis, other archaic
Homos, and the earlier Australopithecines like A. Paranthropus and A. garhi, had already gone
extinct, some at least 1.3 million years before this time, during the Gelasian, or Lower/ early
Palaeolithic. Our earliest known traces date to a morphology said to have emerged between
400,000 and 200,000 years ago. Most paleontologists look to approximately 330,000 years ago.
Our earliest known remains, thus far, were discovered at Jebel Irhoud, in Morocco. See Hublin, J.,
Ben-Ncer, A., Bailey, S. et al. New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin
of Homo sapiens. Nature 546, 289–292 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22336, 08 June
2017, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22336#citeas, Accessed July 21, 2020.
74.3 Evolutionary Latitudes
of a contract with Nature exists, immune to the all but overwhelming doctrine that
our lives are condemned to one side or the other of zero.
If such language reads as quintessentially vague, it must be so if it is ever to envision and effect that same Principle of Uncertainty that guides convergence and overlays in the atmosphere, the oceans, every stream, coral community, and neotropic;
all nutrient turnovers in every soil; maturations, barriers, and lack of barriers to
fertile distributions. And which uncannily works out the relational complexities,
coherence, and incoherence, marking the ecotones between those same biological
and metaphysical individuals and communities. If this vagueness is real, then all the
sciences, at some very minimum, are given a second chance, a reason for optimism
that, perhaps, there is, after all, a conceptual natural selection that favors perpetuities between the lines. The marginalia and fractions that actually add up to the biosphere just days before our arrival, a mere 0.002% of the time since the Universe
herself had come in to being.
12
There is, however, a flaw, even in that muted note of optimism that must not be
overlooked. About 300,000 to 350,000 years ago, there were nine different known
coexisting Homos, members of a largely competitive Genus, which included
H. sapiens.
13
Aside from scant evidence of meager, mutualistic, overlapping settlements and intermating, among two or three Homos, for short time frames, most
forensics indicate a strong likelihood that our species systematically wiped out any
and all competitors. Our ecological destinies were forged by tens of thousands of
years of accumulating choices and attitudes that boded of today’s dominant human
personality.
12 See “What Was It Like When The First Humans Arose On Earth?” by Ethan Siegel, Forbes, May
15, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/05/15/what-was-it-like-when-thefirst-humans-arose-on-earth/#92e098369975, Accessed July 21, 2020.
13 See “300,000 years ago, nine human species lived on Earth. Did Homo sapiens exterminate the
others?” by Nick Longrich, The Conversation, Scroll.in, November 23, 2019, https://scroll.in/
article/944558/300000-years-ago-nine-human-species-lived-on-earth-did-homo-sapiens-exterminate-the-others, Accessed July 21, 2020. In addition to our species, there were H. neanderthalensis, H. erectus, H. rhodesiensis, H. luzonensis, Asiatic Denisovans, H. naledi, H. floresiensis, and
the Chinese “red deer people”. Homo habilis, H. palaeohungaricus, H. cepranensis, other archaic
Homos, and the earlier Australopithecines like A. Paranthropus and A. garhi, had already gone
extinct, some at least 1.3 million years before this time, during the Gelasian, or Lower/ early
Palaeolithic. Our earliest known traces date to a morphology said to have emerged between
400,000 and 200,000 years ago. Most paleontologists look to approximately 330,000 years ago.
Our earliest known remains, thus far, were discovered at Jebel Irhoud, in Morocco. See Hublin, J.,
Ben-Ncer, A., Bailey, S. et al. New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin
of Homo sapiens. Nature 546, 289–292 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature22336, 08 June
2017, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature22336#citeas, Accessed July 21, 2020.
74.3 Evolutionary Latitudes