The Dame

I knew Dame Elisabeth Murdoch not well, but slightly. When I was no more than an extremely callow undergraduate, barely aged seventeen (1982), I served for a bit on the committee of the friends of the library of the National Gallery of Victoria, of which Dame Elisabeth was naturally president. She was exceedingly kind to me then. Later, when I worked at Government House in Melbourne, Dame Elisabeth was—I do not think that this is an exaggeration—a favorite luncheon guest of Dr. McCaughey, whom she obviously worshipped. She was usually seated to the Governor’s left, and always responded to this compliment, even as she approached the age of eighty, with disarming girlishness—a quality I gather otherwise she strictly rationed. Just before she died my mother filled a vacant spot in a regular four who played bridge at Cruden Farm. This was, I think, the last social engagement Mum ever fulfilled and it was clearly too much for her—though she thoroughly enjoyed those intense afternoon rubbers, and was only mildly critical of Dame Elisabeth’s chicken sandwiches. The late and much lamented Jack and Elizabeth Kennedy, who were dear old friends of my parents, took a kindly interest in all the affairs of Dame Elisabeth; they shared a passion for the meticulous cultivation and cross-pollination by hand of violently colored zinnias. I have a feeling that Jack was Dame Elisabeth’s accountant. The Dame was patron of the Victorian Tapestry Workshop, where Mum wound bobbins with Nancye Cain and many other volunteers. The Dame was also interested in the welfare of Trinity College in the University of Melbourne, where occasionally I bumped into her in the early 1990s. So the connections were many and varied. As Rupert Murdoch pointed out in his tribute last week in St. Paul’s Cathedral, Dame Elisabeth’s life ran parallel with, and for almost the whole extent of, that of the Commonwealth of Australia thus far. I gather she was also popular at the Palace. May she rest in peace.

As we get older I suppose that point about many and varied connections becomes truer of life itself. Looking back over the past year’s blogging, I am struck by the number and variety of regretful reminiscences of the fallen that I have felt compelled to scatter like rose petals among more frivolous musings about art, scarlet heels, and other ephemera—Ronald Searle, John Gage, Dame Joan Sutherland, Pope Shenouda III, the King of Tonga, Margaret Whitlam, Peter Steele, Jean McCaughey, Richard Warren, and, now, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. No doubt this is symptomatic of advancing years. Yet I am no obituarist. In fact, notwithstanding the restorative hours before dawn that I often spend devouring two whole pots of tea in my bloggy haze, I have been busier this year than at any time in the past ten. Our huge book and exhibition are essentially finished, and merely await the arrival of the crates. We open on February 27. I should say that Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century has been, is, and will probably remain, the central episode of my working life, and I am mighty proud of it. Please do come and see the show. I suspect the blog has kept me sane, though not as much as my wonderful Lyolik. And now I must go to New York for Christmas.

Guns again

This morning, at a deeply peculiar press conference in Washington, D.C., the executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association had the nerve to call for all American schools to be protected by armed guards. A shifty-looking little man in his mid-sixties, he made a valiant but completely hopeless attempt to argue in the face of all possible reason, and certainly against all available statistics, that this would be the best way to protect children from gun violence. This absurd suggestion is made, moreover, while the people of Newtown, Connecticut, are still burying their dead children. Apparently, it was all the fault of the media. He refused to answer questions, and with baffling meekness the ladies and gentlemen of the press looked on, surely, one presumes, in disbelief. All further comment is superfluous, other than that the bizarre idea that more guns and not fewer is a viable solution to the enduring American love affair with gun slaughter was obviously plucked from a realm of such total disengagement from reality that one wonders whether the person or persons responsible are not completely deranged. I am told there are currently 98,817 elementary, middle, and high schools in the United States, and some tens of thousands of private schools also. What sane parent would ever find reassurance knowing that there was at least one man with a gun strutting up and down the busy corridors of each and all of them? It is hard enough these days for police departments to find adequate recruits, and the prospect of a corps of 100,000 trigger-happy volunteers (arthritic retirees with dodgy bifocals and galloping diabetes, for example) is too creepy to contemplate. One had hoped for sensible proposals, to which prospect the association appeared to allude earlier in the week. However I suppose they are so beholden to the sinister multi-billion-dollar armaments trade that they simply could not escape from its control even if they wanted to, and they obviously do not. What a desperately sad way to approach the feast of Christmas in this great but strange and sometimes inexplicable country.

Queen Elizabeth Land

To mark The Queen’s diamond jubilee it is announced by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall today that henceforth the southern-most portion of the British Antarctic Territory will be named Queen Elizabeth Land. This large, wedge-shaped chunk of Antarctica extends from latitude 60°00’ S to 90°00’ S, and from 20° W to 80° W. No doubt Her Majesty will be pleased, but she may perhaps chuckle inwardly at the thought that she already has a sizable foothold on Antarctica, and has had it moreover for the past eighty-one years. Princess Elizabeth Land is a portion of the vast Australian Antarctic Territory stretching between 64°56’ S and 90°00’ S and between 73°35’ E and 87°43’ E. It was discovered in February 1931 by the British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition, and named after Her then Royal Highness Princess Elizabeth of York (aged four) by the late Sir Douglas Mawson. It is, of course, given to few to have huge territories named after them, but it is surely a unique achievement, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, to be able to add to one’s portfolio in this impressive manner—and that, thanks to the fulcrum of the South Pole, those territories may even abut. How splendid!

Quid tum?

In the light of yesterday’s desperate calamity, a massacre of innocent schoolchildren that took place in an elementary school not twenty-five miles from where I sit, one of the great mysteries of life in America is thrown into stark relief. According to the second amendment (1791) of the United States Constitution, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Many people, including a number who sit for life on the United States Supreme Court, genuinely believe that this is a guarantee of the right of private individuals to buy, own, and use guns, including weapons designed by those sociopaths at Saab, Glock and all the rest to kill as many people as quickly as possible. It is as if that part about the “well regulated militia” were wholly irrelevant, and not the principal reason why such a right was considered necessary in the first place. Hardly anybody who is not an arms or drug dealer and lives in civilized countries outside the Unites States believes that an individual’s right to own a gun should be upheld without careful regulation, scrutiny, and tight control. Many Americans, however, persist in regarding such regulations as a dangerous infringement of personal liberty. Government of the people, by the people, for the people has been a cherished ideological foundation of the Republic since the beginning. Yet obviously this coexists with a profound degree of mistrust of all elected federal, state, and local authorities who make and uphold laws on that very basis. It is a matter of head-scratching mystification that the United States of America could be willing, even determined, to pay so great a human price to maintain what seems such a quaint historical relic as the second amendment, and one so willfully misinterpreted. To say that we now have a well regulated militia in the form of any number of local police departments that are visibly armed to the teeth is a woeful understatement. Leaving aside any other objection, had they known how much more damage an armed man can do today than he ever could in the last decade of the eighteenth century, is it conceivable that the founding fathers would have bequeathed such a curse to their posterity? And what is even more perplexing when you talk to otherwise intelligent, rational persons, around the water-cooler, at the dinner table, or in the public bar, is how hostile many ordinary, decent Americans can be to the idea that fully paid-up, card-carrying psychopaths ought to be prevented as a matter of urgent priority from laying their hands on a brace of automatic weapons—even while they regularly do, and kill randomly and in such shocking storms of wanton, senseless violence. Hand-wringing editorials such as yesterday morning’s in the New York Times ought to make a difference, but they only seem to reinforce the sense of a nation hopelessly polarized between common sense and the fortress mentality of the dangerously gun-obsessed. This great country is, at times, exceedingly difficult to understand.

The Japanese maple

Few things delight me so much as my exquisite Japanese maple, and this is her finest hour. She is a stately old thing, lately attended to by the tree surgeon: the soil around her skirts has been aerated, and certain nutrients administered. She withstood with superb nonchalance the recent hurricane and the snowstorm that followed, which is more than I can claim. The colors only reach this point of high-keyed magnificence for a few weeks in November, barely even a fortnight, and, at this, the moment of climax, a few impertinent leaves have begun to fall, which means that the rest will follow, all at once, in the next few days, depositing within twenty-four to forty-eight hours outside my front door a thick red carpet. And then it will be over. Drew Kenny, who knows these things, tells me that the brightest and most dazzling colors are produced by a wet August, followed by good, thick frosts through September and October, thus producing the best and most vivid chemical reaction. Still, the present show has not disappointed me in any way. Until she disrobes, my Japanese maple will continue to filter the bright light of early afternoon, and give to the rooms on that side of the house a winning blush—a gesture, surely, of apology for the onset of hideous arctic cold that cannot now be far off.

The index

For the past few weeks I have been compiling the index to our next book, Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. Hence the radio silence in the early hours, when, at times, I am active. My apologies to concerned readers. The first index I created was for my first book, and, to my astonishment, that was almost twenty years ago. It earned me a certificate of accreditation to the Australian Society of Indexers in Melbourne, which I still cherish. Indexing a book is a wonderfully absorbing task, and nowadays under-appreciated. Not that serious bibliophiles do not appreciate a good index. Rather, it is becoming a widespread misconception, even among some editors and publishers, that somehow keyword searching and computers or even, God forbid, book indexing software, can somehow take the place of an indexer with a brain, a measure of judgment, and a beating heart. This is simply not the case. Many concepts, ideas, and themes that recur in a book do so rather subtly, and lurk beneath sentences and in chapters that require deft herding, and much discrimination—in the best sense. Indeed they may only swim into particular focus when the indexer has had the good sense to identify and collate them under clear and simple headings: food; Jewry and Jewishness; florists, court; Fashoda Incident (1898); or servants, ubiquity of, see also butlers, chauffeurs, valets, and maids, house-, ladies’, scullery, still-room, etc.; whatever. At times the author is only partly aware of their very existence. This is especially true when the volume contains the work of many hands, as in this case. The indexer’s art is therefore to join many, sometimes hundreds of dots, mindful that the resulting reference tool may open for potential readers a rewarding vista of possibility. You can never know what people will try to find in an index, but obviously the more and better points of access you create, the wider the vista that will open before them, like a glorious Persian carpet: Tabriz, Kashan, Herat, see also Kerman. I suppose the word create is key here. Book indexing is a deeply creative process, and can even embrace humor. Admittedly, these days indexes are inclined to be starchy. I have noticed lately that many indexers loftily declare their firm intention to disregard titles and honorifics when listing names. How foolish! In the present context, such an approach would be almost insulting because it flies in the face of Edwardian social usage, whose nuances can be extremely revealing, for naturally “Vincent, Lady Helen (later Viscountess D’Abernon)” floated effortlessly several social notches above “Clarke, Marguerite, Lady,” but not nearly so high as the stratospheric “Gower, Millicent Sutherland-Leveson-, Duchess of Sutherland.” This is not to exclude the special claims of “Wettach, Charles Adrien, called ‘Grock,’ clown,” or even “‘Toby,’ performing dog,” far from it, but the indexer has a palette and brushes, and would be ill-advised not to resort to them liberally. Such an approach admittedly requires a good number of wordy cross-references such as “Cranborne, Viscountess, see Cecil, Marjorie Olein Gascoyne-, Marchioness of Salisbury,” or “Minto, fourth Earl of, see Kynynmound, Gilbert John Elliot-Murray-, fourth Earl of Minto.” Never mind. It’s worth it. In the end, when the almost defining issue of space raises its ugly head, as it surely must, these things can afford to bite the dust. But, with luck, there will be enough space, so they can stay for the edification of future inquirers into the vanished universe of Edwardian pecking order.

What do you need to be a good indexer? You need time and patience. You need to switch off the media, ignore e-mail, and concentrate for long periods, because you are, in a sense, reading and re-reading the book in question more closely even than the authors. You need a sense of proportion, such that a single passing reference to this or that does not cut the mustard as regards the special form of acknowledgment that is a discrete entry in the index. You need an excellent library of reference books (above), trustworthy ones—none of this wiki nonsense. You need a good chair, a strong bottom, broad shoulders, and a wide desk. You need to care enough about consistency to be able to render at times vital, last-minute assistance to overworked copyeditors and typesetters, but also to be flexible enough to allow for subtly revealing forms of creative inconsistency within the parameters of the index itself. You need to be a good note-taker, and to have an eye for detail, as microscopic as possible, whilst keeping hold of the larger vista. These are not insignificant skills, and it is a tragedy for this little profession, this calling, that publishers are no longer in a position to pay fair market rates for the invaluable service an indexer provides.

In the end, a further factor may strengthen the usefulness of an index: luck. After the job is done, and the index itself is read for the usual editorial double-checking, one suddenly becomes aware of arbitrary but stimulating adjacencies, a simple consequence of alphabetical order. Thus:

Morgan, John Pierpont (1837–1913)

Morgan, William de (1839–1917)

Morland, George (1763–1804)

Morrell, Lady Ottoline (1873–1938)

Morris, William (1834–1896)

Morris and Company

Morris dancing

motor tourism, see also chauffeurs, problems of etiquette

That’s just a random sampling, and I’m only up to page 360.

Hurricane Sandy 3

The first point is that in my neighborhood of New Haven we were astonishingly lucky. It could have been so much worse; the difference between us and what we are now seeing in lower Manhattan, the borough of Queens and New Jersey may be attributed to the random distance of sixty insignificant miles, and the storm was more than 1,000 miles in diameter. Pure luck. The second point is one that persons who have lived through a cyclone or hurricane often make, but which is incomprehensible if you have not experienced it at first hand: The sound. It is not a roar, even above the sickening cracks of big trees snapping in half like toothpicks, one by one, all around you, so much as a mighty and, to me, terrifying howl, with industrial base-notes of steam train, and at very close proximity. Mercifully this lasted only for a comparatively brief period from approximately 5.30 p.m. on Monday evening (when, of course, we lost power) until about 10.30 p.m., at which point the whole thing stopped, and there were even glimpses of a cold full moon. It did go on, of course, for much of the night, but intermittently. In the late afternoon, before the theatrics set in, the sky turned a deep pea green; I have only once seen anything like it, and that was when Mark Aronson and I narrowly dodged a tornado that mowed across Springfield, Mass., last year or the year before—I forget. At about 2 o’clock on Monday afternoon the clouds stopped scudding, and started sprinting most unnaturally. I gathered up a few precious things, and pathetically stowed them in the linen cupboard, as if this would have made the slightest difference had the roof come off. Still, it was as well to be kept busy. After dark I repaired to the basement with my duvet, pillow, flashlight, bottled water, and what remained of my supply of Fortnums fudge. I sat there feeling scared and stupid, mainly scared. You cannot sleep in case something serious strikes the house, or floods the basement, or the neighbors strike similar problems, and, of course, with cell phone coverage swept away, you are totally in the dark not only literally but figuratively also. At the head of my shopping list this week is an old-fashioned transistor radio, or, better still, a hand-cranked clockwork one for real emergencies. That, and a generator. I am not quite sure why one clings to total irrationality in situations such as this, but for some reason the fact that the power is still off—and the fridge full of slowly rotting food—bothers me far more than it would otherwise because I make out my monthly check to a relatively small but profitable corporation that persists in calling itself, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, The United Illuminating Company.

Hurricane Sandy 2

The atmosphere in New Haven this morning has shifted from portentous to frankly strange. Nothing much at all is happening, yet. The phone rang well before dawn, and it was dear Uncle Alec—calling from his magnificent longhorn cattle estancia at Fingal on the Mornington Peninsula, to make sure I am all right. He’s now going to bed, as is the rest of Australia. But I am getting up. The newspaper was delivered as usual, as it was on the morning of Hurricane Irene last year. The city also kindly collected the rubbish, an almost heroic gesture in the circumstances. It has evidently been raining all night, though it best resembles just now what the Irish call a “soft,” a fine swirling drizzle, but notably cooler than last evening. Gusts of wind that normally one would regard as empty puff, seem rather more ominous amid all the canceled flights, trains and emergency preparedness measures that have kicked in all the way from the Carolinas to Massachusetts—as well as several hundreds of thousands of poor souls urged to evacuate their neighborhoods. We are told to follow the directions of our local and state government officials. In due course those gusts promise at the very least to complete the work of the fall, in short order. The sugar maples are now almost entirely bare, but like a mad and restless child the wind is tossing their leaves all over the place. The sound of a winter wind is bleak and barren, but the fall adds texture. The small note is a rustle, but the wooded hillside opposite is producing now a rhythmical ebb and surge, uncannily marine in character, which at this stage is almost comforting. From my bedroom window I see the single, wholly contingent wire that droops wearily from the corner of my house all the way across to the far side of Chapel Street and a messy aggregation of fixtures that cling there to an ancient wooden pole. This doubles as the host for a very old street light, but the pole leans alarmingly shy of vertical. The wire is now swinging in the wind from side to side like some malnourished lazybones in his hammock, fodder for any one of a dozen potentially dangerous branches that could easily snap off through the next twenty-four hours, maybe longer. In fact the first of these cracked with the sickening loudness of rotten timber just five minutes ago, mercifully just beyond my northern boundary in the other direction. This first casualty gave up the ghost before whatever battle lies ahead of us has even begun. It is surely significant that well into the second decade of the twenty-first century one faces the almost certain prospect of power loss, probably for days, with an air of complete resignation, due to the hopelessness of our electrical infrastructure. In a land of blizzards and hurricanes and forests, why would any thinking person persist with the nineteenth-century project of stringing little wires from post to post? Reinvent the system, and put them all below ground where they belong.

Hurricane Sandy

The atmosphere this morning in New Haven is eerily portentous. The birds are simply beside themselves, and four large hawks are wheeling high above me now, evidently taking advantage of eccentric rodent movements over the wooded hillside opposite. The sky has a weird pallor, a lowering carpet sullenness that I do not recall ever having seen before. The streets are almost empty. Were it not for a sense of overriding natural indifference, one might think of certain atmospherics in Guy Mannering or, come to think of it, Ivanhoe: “‘A murrain take thee,’ rejoined the swineherd; ‘wilt thou talk of such things, while a terrible storm of thunder and lightning is raging within a few miles of us? Hark, how the thunder rumbles! and for summer rain, I never saw such broad downright flat drops fall out of the clouds; the oaks too, notwithstanding the calm weather, sob and creak with their great boughs as if announcing a tempest. Thou can’st play the rational if thou wilt; credit me for once, and let us home ere the storm begins to rage, for the night will be fearful.’” On the other hand, Hurricane Sandy might fizzle but I rather doubt it. My money is with the swineherd.

A murrain, incidentally, is an archaic term for various infectious diseases affecting cattle and sheep, hence its use here as a curse.

The journey

I have lately signed up to participate in the Genographic Project. This remarkable effort by the National Geographic Society “is an ambitious attempt to help answer fundamental questions about where we originated and how we came to populate the earth.” All you need to do is buy the kit, follow the instructions, take a swab, post it off to the lab, and wait patiently.

When DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) is passed from one generation to the next, most of it is recombined by processes that endow each of us with our individuality. But some portions of DNA remain largely intact through the generations, altered only occasionally by spontaneous mutations, the equivalent of a genetic spelling or typographical error.

 

Such mutations survive in the form of genetic markers, of which approximately 150,000 have now been reliably isolated. These markers allow geneticists to map with extraordinary precision our common evolutionary development through innumerable generations, and to all the different regions through which man has gradually migrated (or not) since we originated with a single ancestor who lived in Africa approximately 140,000 years ago.

 

This in turn has made possible the study of genetic anthropology, whose value, among many other things, is to impress upon all people everywhere the shared aspects of our descent from that common ancestor, and even the extent to which we preserve within ourselves a measure of contact between some of our most distant ancestors and now extinct hominid cousins in the Neanderthal and Denisovan families. There is also the advantage of building a sufficiently large database that will help medical scientists to get to the bottom of certain diseases for which there may be some not yet sufficiently understood genetic predisposition.

According to the Project website, the human body is composed of trillions of cells, which form the basic units of life and combine to form more complex tissues and organs. Inside each cell, genes make up a sort of blueprint for protein production that determines how each will function. Genes also determine physical characteristics or traits. The complete set of some 20,000 to 25,000 genes is called the genome. Only a tiny fraction of the genome sets the human body apart from those of other animals, which, incidentally, is another reason why the Genographic Project is an important one to participate in. We are not merely urged to see ourselves as distant cousins of all other people, but as far more closely related to many other forms of life on earth than we have ever before been inclined fully to grasp.

Mostly half of the genes that make up our genome came from our father, and half from our mother. Each half represents a shuffled combination of DNA passed down to us from our ancestors. This process of shuffling, recombination, and shuffling again, generation after generation, makes it impossible to trace lines of descent because it creates an ever new genetic mixture of all our ancestors.

Fortunately for anthropological geneticists, however, there are parts of the genome that are passed intact from parent to child, and have not been shuffled at all. In these segments the genetic code varies only when from time to time spontaneous mutations occur at random.

The Y chromosome is the sex-determining chromosome in humans. While all other chromosomes are found in matching pairs, it is the mismatch of the Y chromosome with its partner, the X chromosome, that determines gender—men have a mismatched pair (Y and X), while women have two X chromosomes. Because the Y chromosome does not have a matching chromosome, most of it escapes the shuffling process. The Y chromosome passes intact from father to son, altered only by occasional mutations.

The mitochondrial genome is the female counterpart of the Y chromosome. Mitochondria are self-reproducing structures found inside the cells of all higher organisms, typically present in hundreds of copies per cell. They are responsible for generating most of the energy used by the cell. Because there are no mitochondria in the head of a mature sperm, they are passed down solely from mother to child, and thenceforth through successive generations of daughters, granddaughters, and so on.

One region of particular importance in mitochondrial DNA is the so-called hypervariable region, where the pace of mutation is up to a hundred times faster than that of the nuclear genome. Because of its much shorter length (several hundred nucleotides versus millions of nucleotides for the Y chromosome), the hypervariable region can be scanned quickly and reveals many highly informative mutational events that have been passed down through the matriline.

So we have much to learn from the Y chromosome DNA we inherited from Dad and the mitochondrial DNA from Mum, but the exact shape of what is effectively an immense whole-of-population family tree is further shaped to a larger or lesser degree by evolutionary forces, most importantly natural selection, migration, and what is known as genetic drift.

Except for religious zealots, everyone outside certain of the United States of America knows what natural selection is, and how Charles Darwin and others discovered how it works to preserve and refine beneficial genetic mutations and to eliminate harmful ones—insuring the survival of the fittest, although evidently this does not apply to those males of the species who currently run the international financial and investment banking sectors. Likewise, the impact of vastly different natural environments through which humans have migrated—hot ones, cold ones, wet ones, dry ones, mountainous ones, or marshy ones—have had an obvious impact upon the mechanisms of natural selection in different places and through different ages.

However, some genetic changes, such as “allele frequency,” occur randomly within discrete sub-populations and are duly passed from parent to child—thus imposing a further shaping influence upon human evolution. Allele frequency is the measurable change in the frequency of a gene variant or allele in populations due to random sampling. The effect of this genetic drift varies sharply with the size of sub-populations. Small sub-populations confined for very long periods to a distant and rarely visited island, for example—think Iceland, think Tasmania, think Madagascar—are subject to much greater genetic drift for the same reason that scoring seven heads and three tails after ten coin tosses is far, far more likely to occur than scoring 700,000 heads after one million tosses.

Fascinating, yes, but what does it all add up to?

Approximately 60,000 years ago homo sapiens very nearly became extinct, as eventually the Neanderthals and Denisovans did, though not before successfully mating with our ancestors when they encountered one another in Eurasia not too long afterwards. (Those of us who stayed put in sub-Saharan Africa never had this opportunity.) It is worth repeating: We almost vanished from the face of the earth before we even started our common journey; it was a very close call. 

At that time, pressed by some combination of presumably terrible circumstances, groups separating from as few as 2,000 surviving specimens of homo sapiens set out from the Asaf Depression in Ethiopia: north, west, and south. 

By 50,000 years ago, our ancestors had successfully multiplied, pulling back from the brink of extinction, fanning across south Asia and across the land bridge into Australia. By 40,000 years ago we had pushed into Mesopotamia and through Southeast Asia and up into China. By 30,000 years ago we had crossed back over Central Asia, and by that route into Northern Europe. At around the same time some of us double-backed from Central Asia and headed down into the Indian subcontinent. 20,000 years ago there was a great migration from East Asia over another land bridge into North America and ownards into South America. 

10,000 years ago further migrations occurred from the Middle East through southern Europe and across North Africa, in other words around both sides of the Mediterranean Sea; from Southeast Asia into what turned into the Indonesian archipelago, and a fresh wave from Northeast Asia into North America. These most recent global shifts in population appear to have coincided with the invention of agriculture, though there is mounting evidence that much earlier fire was successfully manipulated to “manage” natural environments, especially in Australia. 

We do not know when or how language gradually developed over these massively long periods, but it was probably very early. We mastered the horse in approximately 4,000 to 3,500 B.C. Certainly writing and numbers were invented soon afterwards in Mesopotamia, in approximately 3,200 B.C., and, quite separately, in Central America in about 600 B.C. Most intellectual, philosophical, scientific, artistic and many other attainments have occurred since then, barely 5,500 years in a 60,000-year journey. We have come an awfully long way, but before too long my three brothers and I will know much more about the approximate route our own people took.