It has become a daily practice for me to spend at least a few moments thinking of my ancestors, typically welcoming them to be part of my day. However, just “who” those ancestors are has changed dramatically.
I keep a photo of my Mom and Dad on my dresser, and that photo is a routine stop in my morning routine. It is a photo of them before they had children, and I like to think of them as simply Mary Lee and Henry. To me, they have a reality in that photo that otherwise gets distorted by the later varnish of parenthood. They are in an intimate sense, my ancestors, and I like to feel how their presence as a woman and a man continues in me.
That is changing. For a month, I have been immersed in a university course on the Fossil Record of Mammals, and my notion of my ancestors has been stretched way beyond that photo on my dresser. I notice that I have a couple hundred million years of ancestors to account for.
My hallway upstairs is a photo gallery of some of my ancestors that go back several generations. I sometimes pause and look at them. My parents, my grandmother, my great grandparents all remind me that I have identifiable roots that go back more than a century. But my ancestors go back much further, and I carry traces of them all.
I have been aware that I have ancestors who lived in Europe. I don’t know what their faces looked like, but I suspect I see something of them when I look in the mirror each morning. If I turn my imagination loose, I can imagine those ancestors who might have been struggling to become “human” some 20,000 years ago. Even they would be easily recognized as someone who looked just like me if they walked into my garden, dressed in modern clothing. I would not have trouble being identified as their progeny. They would easily pass as my ancestors, and I am acutely aware that I carry traces of them.
However, the humans who lived 200,000 years ago probably didn’t look just like me, and they had not yet begun to act just like my contemporaries. However, there were many similarities, and it is not at hard to recognize them as my ancestors. I am one of their distant children, and I carry in my bones unmistakable signs of my lineage.
Of course, it doesn’t stop there. As I am learning in my class on Mammal fossils, I have ancestors that were running around 200 million years ago. They exhibited traits then that I clearly share with them, even though they ranged in size between a mouse and a medium sized dog. They were eaten by larger dinosaurs and they included small dinosaurs in their diet. The modern humans that I know might not have lived in the time of the dinosaurs, but my ancestors certainly did. They just looked a little different than I do now.
It is a new experience for me to be thinking of these ancient precursors of humans as my ancestors, but I am beginning to occasionally invite them into my day. I am who and what I am because of them, and for me that is enough to make them my ancestors.
I am slightly aware that the reptilian part of my brain goes back in time even farther. My brain development and activity reflects my reptilian ancestors that go back well beyond 300 million years. That is an awareness that still seems a bit slippery to me. But I suspect that some day I will recognize, even welcome reptiles as my ancestors as well.
For now, it is enough for me to think about the early mammals. They were my very ancient ancestors who scurried around a variety of plants I would scarcely recognize. What was part of them is now part of me. It is enough for me to recognize them as my remote ancestors and occasionally thank them for making me the kind of individual I am.