Opinion Editorial January, 2025: Precariouser and Precariouser
Any dancer will tell you how precarious it can be to perform their art. Indeed, dance careers have been ended prematurely by a mis-timed or under-practiced move. As I watched and photographed the young Indian lady in this month's photo, I was amazed that she didn't hurt herself. She was, after all, bending, twisting and spinning in the most graceful ways imaginable.
There are many other performing arts that include precarious skills. Yet as we begin 2025, perhaps it is our fate itself that has never been more precarious.
Last month, Syria became even more precarious than it has been for over a decade. Its new de facto leaders claim that its historic population diversity will ensure its success. In fact, the opposite is true. While places like Burma (Myanmar), Gaza, Haiti, Ukraine and Sudan became more and more precarious, Canada and South Korea entered their most politically precarious situation in recent history last month.
If we choose to examine 2024 as a whole, just like Alice observing her body becoming "curiouser and curiouser," we can observe the global climate, the global economy, ceasefire negotiations and even democracy becoming precariouser and precariouser.
Just as scientists have identified five historic mass extinction events, I propose we begin to study "mass precarions" — periods of maximum precariousness in human history.
The Cold War was the most recent mass precarion. During that time, there was a real chance of nuclear war. Before that, the two world wars (combined) constituted a mass precarion. Probably the prior one was the European bubonic plague.
Once we go back beyond recorded history, it becomes more difficult to identify similar periods. But we can undertake informed speculation. As population groups first migrated around the world, hunting and gathering, they would have endured "mini precarions." Some groups would have died out due to factors like hunger, disease, climate catastrophes and non-viable gene pools. This period encompasses most of human history.
Not until we learned how to domesticate plants and then animals (thanks to indigenous knowledge) did we become sedentary. That was when human populations grew large enough that, for the first time, our fate was not subject to a mass precarion.
Or so we thought. New data published last month in Science and Nature reveals a much more complex history. Modern humans first left Africa around 60,000 years ago. Along with many later waves of emigrants they all died out. But one later group had found its way to the Middle East around 50,000 years ago. It encountered and interbred with Neanderthals.
The new data shows that for 7,000 years the three groups — Neanderthals, modern humans and hybrids — lived and migrated together. More importantly, they continued to interbreed. 7,000 years is only the blink of an eye on an evolutionary time scale. Yet the hybrids had inherited enough Neanderthal DNA to give them a survival advantage against mass precarion factors such as climate and disease.
That advantage was not always enough, however. Members of all three groups that had found their way to Europe also died out 40,000 years ago. Almost all humans of European descent today come from a population of hybrids that replaced them many years later.
Many scientists believe our planet has already entered the sixth mass extinction. Like the current mass precarion, that may be largely of our own making.
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