Colleen Fox

Kindred

Excerpt

In the American Museum of Natural History, a muscular man lifts one of two blonde-haired, blue-eyed tots to get a better look at a Neanderthal’s skull. Look at their forehead, see? It’s smaller than ours because we’ve got more brain in there! He sets the one girl down and lifts the other, See how small their forehead is compared to ours? We’re the smartest animals in the world! He pauses for a split second before continuing in a lower, quicker tone, —despite everything we’ve done to ruin it. OK! Ready? 

I don’t hear the girls answer, but I see them move on from the corner of my eye. I am standing in front of our earliest ancestor: plesiadapis cookei. The fossils and bones we have of this creature date back fifty-six million years, to the earliest known origin of humankind. From a further distance, I hear the father say to his girls, that’s your great, great, great, great-great-great-great-greatgreatgreatgreatgreat grandpa! Our umpteenth grandparent looks at me out of a lemur-like frame, with massive nasal cavities and eyes on either side of its head. It has front teeth that are similar to the teeth of the rats I saw scavenging around the tracks of the subway I took to get here, and small paws with large claws for hands and feet. There is nothing remotely recognizable about us in this creature, except, I am told, that by analyzing the teeth scientists are able to presume that these earliest primates were shifting their diets. Whereas before they had been eating mostly insects, the flatness of most of the teeth shows their diet included less insects and more fruits and vegetation. 

That’s it: the dawn of humanity. I almost laugh out loud. Such a small distinction and yet such was the origin of our species. There’s something so undignified about it that it seems almost indecent, and for a moment I’m scandalized like I imagine a Catholic priest would be, huffing and blushing underneath my mask. But rather than being paired with the disgust and rage I felt in my preadolescence, I feel almost tickled. There’s something so precious about these incremental changes that I can’t help but find their fragility comedic. How many have been executed throughout history because they refused to believe that the Earth was the centerpiece of the universe? 

One of my favorite lines by Annie Dillard comes to mind: “Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter.”

O

Fifty-six to forty-eight million years ago: the genesis of our kind, the Early Eocene. From the Greek eos, meaning dawn or earliest, and a Latinized version of the Greek kainos, meaning new. The term was coined in English by Reverend William Whewell (the Reverend had a knack for naming; he also came up with the words we use for scientist, physicist, linguistics, consilience, uniformitarianism, catastrophism, and astigmatism), who decided this period of time was the dawn of the recent. When I began looking into the history of our species, nothing about fifty-six to forty-eight million years seemed recent. But as I’ve tried to stretch further back into the dawn of life itself, on a planet almost barren save for a few tenacious carbon-based microbes, my head begins to spin. My sense of time expands; I imagine a single grain of black sand in a swimming pool full of yellow, and I think, there we are, that’s us. There’s the good Reverend’s recent time. 

Fifty-six to forty-eight million years ago, the earth was much hotter than it is now. In 2021, the average temperature of our home is 59℉, whereas the Early Eocene’s average temperature was 86℉. While we know the poles as blocks of ice, they would have been a temperate 72℉ back then. The ocean was much higher, post-climate change higher, the kind that would swallow New York City in a single wave. The continents were smashed together in a land mass almost unrecognizable to us today, and all that smashing led to high levels of volcanic activity. Imagine: a world without grass, covered in dense tropical greens, with a collection of animals that would be both essentially similar and entirely foreign to the species we live alongside today, when the world was essentially a globe-wide swamp, spewing and oozing lava from its seams. 

It was in this climate that we came into being. First as a glorified squirrel-looking primate with a nimble frame and a bodacious bushy tail, then as lemurs who could grip and manipulate branches. Whereas we first used our enlarged nasal cavities to rely heavily on the sense of smell, and our clawed hands and feet to skitter across high tree branches, in a brief eight million years our nasal cavities shrunk, our foreheads grew, and our eyes moved to the front of our heads. Our fingers and toes stretched, and suddenly we were gripping our way through the swampy forests and wetlands, relying on our sense of sight more than we ever had before. There is nothing similar about our faces or fur, but in the illustrations of notharctus tenebrosus, I recognize our thighs and teeth. We were chewing on leafy greens, and because of this, our digestive systems were slow, our digestive tracts long. We leapt from tree to tree, arching our newly flexible spines as we traveled through lush limbs and hot, humid air. 

As I try to picture this, I remember when my high school best friend discovered her mother didn’t believe in evolution. I don’t remember what they were talking about, or how the topic came up, but she said something along the lines of I can’t believe we came from monkeys, I just don’t want to. I remember that her husband was shocked; he didn’t know she held those beliefs. There was a pregnant pause before everyone snapped back into motion. Afterward, my friend and I laughed about how we’d have to vet our partners for their beliefs on evolution in the future, especially if we were dating in Texas. We toasted with tequila shots to the monkeys that made us, as if it were a privilege to have been the irreverent, undignified creatures we once were.

About the Author

Colleen Fox is an MFA candidate in creative Nonfiction who writes about the myriad of ways in which humans relate to the natural world, both through significant encounters and in light of climate change.