Ancient America

Pic from wikipedia "species" site.


Coming home, a show about Ancient Amercians was on National Geographic. I'm not sure why ice would be a barrier to migrations...Eskimos travel along it okay...and the Shakleton story suggests survival and long travel is possible.

But anyway, I was thinking on...what to call it...categories...

Naturalist books show the family tree with all the animals and plants sorted out...humanity being one species on one branch..Homo sapians.

What makes us unique is this...

When a study is made of an individual of another species, all the species except us, one individual, how it looks, how it lives, pretty much defines how all the other members of the species look and live. It's not total uniformity, individuals have personalities, and each unique, but it's pretty close to uniformity.

With people it's different. Study one individual, how they look, how they live, and you will not have a grip on how every person lives.

You know, on thinking on this, I realized that if you study an individual's career, like a dentist, you might have a handle on "dentists" in a rough sense like the other "species". Sometimes I think whatever differentiated the species is still at work, but on a different level, in people.

Which, hold your hat, has led to think that there is a Human Kingdom in the Tree of Life, like there is an Animal Kingdom, and Plant Kingdom.
(hmmph...a search of 'Human Kingdom' turns up a lot, so it's not a unique notion...though it looks to be picked up mosty by metaphysical groups with small concern how people cooperate with the other Kingdoms...)

We're not a species, we're a whole classification.

Now, this whole notion was more distinct in ancient culture. One tribe would all wear the same clothing, and have the same religion, and pursue daily life much the same way. Study one Eskimo and you have a handle on all of them.

This was the old world, in the new, the present, it's tough to tell from how people look, mostly from the clothes they wear, what sort of people...what "tribe" they belong too.

I see people from all over the world on holiday, so I know a bit here.

This will change...if how I think Nature has people gravitate to tribes. By tribes I mean uniformity in life style and appearance. Dentists will someday wear distinctive clothes, and their children will become dentists, and so forth, if my idea has merit. It might get to the point where only dentists can mate with dentists, the defining bench mark of a species is only a member of a spiecies can successfully mate with another member of that species.

(It might happen that an infant dentist might take to dentistry the way a young bird takes to flight...this to say what is learned now may become instinctive. I've seen something like this in baseketball...some kids take to it seemingly instinctively...almost a telepathic absorption of the "skills". And if this happens, the new species of dentist may discard the kindof swiss army knife hallmark of people, being able to learn most anything. That skill would only get in the way of a young dentist's maturation!! I'm picking on dentists...toothache.)

The Kingdom of People will be a whole new level of the ecosystem...and one wonders if it will be in cooperative relationship with the Animal and Plant Kingdoms, whose ancient cooperation with one another is the foundation of life.

The scenery in the TV shows is almost devoid of animal and plant life. A walkabout in the city and all around is an 'ecosystem' of machinery and technology. We could live in outer space with it, no problem, or on a world sterile of other life, or in some giant space craft...but is that what we want, or some subset tribe in the Human Kingdom?

I dont know...

"Who will wear the starry crown?"

Next a show in the Roman Colosseum, and then one about a 'monstrous machine"...a giant skip loader...with "massive biceps"... the coming Kingdom of the Machines...

We'll shop, and excavate, 'till we drop!!

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
August 23, 2007