Common History

Long before the sub-continent came crashing into the southern flank of Eurasia, before Antarctica got frozen stuck over the Southern Pole, before the dinosaur and the Deccan Traps eruptions, the Chicxulub Impact Crater, what was there of humankind on this planet? Surely the soul of humankind yet unborn must have roamed the mantle crust. He/she must have traversed the spine of Pangea, that super-continent ancestor whose break-up would later give birth to seven modern-day progeny, must have seen the great inland deserts and blue-white glaciers like teeth on the heights of the harsh intemperate hinterlands. Did he/she, floating evanescent, an ether of something yet to be, cross unknowingly the line that would one day break through between Africa and South America and hear without understanding the voice of an Atlantic Ocean rumbling beneath in the planet’s fertile womb? Or perhaps she/he knew all along, and one day, dipping his/her toes in the Tethy’s Sea, looked about with inquisitive eyes at the vast interior ocean—here Africa, there India to the right, Eurasia on the left, and far off in the distance the diamond-shaped head of the Kamchackta Peninsula rounding off the shore. These were the component pieces of the world she/he would come to know, the world that would witness a flickering light 250 million years later as spirit turned to a life spanning, thus far, a trivial 200,000 years in the existence of this singular planet.