Chewing Gum Revelations about the Relations

Written by Dr Klaus L E Kaiser on January 10, 2020. Posted in Current News

My Dear Relatives close by and far afield, the science of ancestral lineages is progressing rapidly. As it shows, nearly each of us is related to everyone else via some DNA (desoxy-ribonucleic acid) fragments that we inherited from our Neanderthal- GREAT-(GREAT-…) grand-mothers and -fathers.

As an article at dailygamingworld.com states “A shocking discovery is that modern humans and Neanderthals mated several times during the last ice age, although our lines split 800,000 years ago. For this reason, many people now have Neanderthal DNA.”

I don’t know why that would be shocking, either to you or the late Neanderthals. Doesn’t everyone have ancestors?

So, what about the chewing gum?

As I understand it and as surprising as it may sound, recent findings of certain (human) DNA fragments in an ancient “chewing gum” are said to prove our ancestry beyond any doubt. There it says “She [the chewing gum chewing girl] lived on an island in the Baltic Sea around 3,700 B.C. She was lactose intolerant and may have suffered from gum disease, and she had recently dined on a meal that included ducks and hazelnuts. Like many ancient European hunter-gatherers, she was likely blue-eyed with dark skin and hair.”

Who would have thought that ancient chewing gum could be of such importance to our common forebearers?

Our common ancestors may have been the mysterious Denisovans or even much older proto-humans or hominins called Australopithecines, who lived close to a million years ago, but what are a few years among relatives?

No doubt, you are aware that neither evolution nor life on earth is a straight path forward. Just look at the dinosaurs. They lived (quite well) at a time when the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels were between 2,000 and 4,000 ppm (parts per million, or roughly five to ten times higher than what they are now.

Dinosaurs

The dinosaurs came about some 230 million years ago and over the following 160 million years developed into a variety of distinct creatures.  Some did quite well, others not so. But what really did them in, all in one fell swoop, was an asteroid falling from the sky.

That piece of extraterrestrial rock, estimated to be only a few miles in diameter but travelling at a speed of 30+ miles/SECOND caused tremendous mayhem here on this planet. The impact, known by geologists as the “KT-boundary” event occurred some 66 million years ago and resulted in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction which destroyed a majority of the world’s Mesozoic species, including all dinosaurs, except some early bird and reptile species.

Tyrannosaurus rex and all the other large dinosaurs disappeared, more or less instantly, at least in the geologic time scale.

The few species that survived that cataclysmic impact were small creatures, living mostly in burrows and caves, barely clinging to life, even under favorable conditions. Somehow they survived and over the next 60 million years grew into a large group of mammals. Hominids didn’t show up until the end of that period.

Hominids  

Proto- and later hominids are thought to have come about only a few million years ago.  Even the Neanderthals, who were around for approximately half a million years died out approximately 40,000 years ago (except for those of us who may carry some of their genes) and didn’t make it much past their prime. Similarly, our other cousins or ancestors, the Cro-Magnon people, who were around as late as 20,000 years ago may also have left some DNA that we are now enjoying.

What to Do?

So, forget the carbon dioxide nonsense and try to make the best of life! Who knows when the next geological “boundary-event” may happen?

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