​A Gigantic Bush

Humanity has always been on the move. The new science of paleogenetics proves it. Humans have been crossing lands since Lucy decided to climb down from a tree on the African savanna. Every human should read “A World On The Move” in the July National Geographic. We humans don’t have family trees. We are all tiny branches and leaves on the same gigantic single human bush growing out of mother continent Africa.

Genetic scientists can now take a thousandth of an ounce of a many-centuries old human bone or tooth and determine hair and eye color, whether the person can digest milk or not, and reveal thousands of clues about our ancient ancestors—and ourselves. The scientists state that all Europeans regardless of country are a mix of ancient bloodlines from Africa, the entire Middle East, and all the Russian plains. Christians normally portray Adam and Eve as blonde-haired and blue-eyed Aryans. Perhaps someday paleo geneticists will verify—and locate the Garden of Eden by GPS. So many technical advances have been made in a few years a well-preserved skeleton can now be totally sequenced for about $500. As an example of new discoveries, normally high school world history students have been taught that the English national monument of Stonehenge was built by the Druids of the British Isles over 5,000 years ago. Actually the huge stone monument was completed by migrants from the Russian steppes.

Genetic scientists always look for skulls when searching for DNA sources. All of human history will probably be researched by using eye teeth or the petrous bone of the ear. The petrous bone, about the size of a fingertip, is a part of the inner ear, the most protected bone in the body

Scientific Fact: Every Country In The World Is A Land Of Immigrants
We have had an intense study of our family Hominidae for the 32 years we have been able to work with DNA. Our family of apes and humans has transformed through evolution into Homo Sapiens, the only extant group left. Oh, there might be a few knuckle-dragging Neanderthals still in politics—but most of us have moved on. We are all immigrants from Africa. Our combined families are now over six million years old, but our first families did not leave Africa for over 5.6 million years. Our family of Homo Sapiens is about 315,000 years old but did not begin to leave Africa until 60,000 years ago. Some of our adventurous modern cousins reached southern Europe about 45,000 years ago—after taking about 15,000 years to make their way through the Middle East. By the way, DNA tells us that our cousins at the time had dark skin. Adam and Eve may not have been blonde and blue-eyed after all. Just think of all the Christian statues and paintings that will have to be changed to reflect “real” history.

Around 27,000 years ago northern Europe was still in the Ice Age with some parts covered by ice a mile deep. Our ancestors huddled in caves in southern Europe and learned to hunt mammoths, horses, and aurochs—which later evolved to beasts like our modern cattle. They showed their artistic ability by leaving magnificent drawings and engravings of the animals they killed on the walls of their caves. Europe started to warm about 14,500 years ago, so our ancestors moved north, developed stone tools from material left by glaciers, and settled in small villages instead of caves. Serbian archaeologists in the 1960’s dug up a fishing village on the shores of the present river Danube where about 100 Homo Sapiens had established themselves about 9,000 years ago. This group lived primarily on fish and left half-human, half-fish carvings on the walls of their dwellings. The village survived for 2,000 years until farmers forced them out because of the good land. Farming was first developed in present-day Turkey about 8,000 years ago. They grew emmer and einkorn which later evolved to our present-day wheat. It took only 2,000 years for farming to spread over most of Europe. By that time farmers had also domesticated sheep and goats to add to their larder. And by this time human skin had turned from dark to light in Europe because of changes in climate. Incidentally, DNA researchers working on the fishing village discovered an early form of the black plague called Yersinia pestis. This is the plague microbe that killed almost half of all Europeans in the 14th Century. The microbe is still alive and well in the 21st Century.

Will DNA Research Change Our Attitudes About Religion And Relationships?
Would Ronald Reagan have changed his attitude about blacks if he had known his family ancestors came from Africa? In a sense, 7.6 billion Homo Sapiens on planet Earth can be traced back to central Africa if we accept the scientific fact of DNA analysis. Will we become more tolerant of members of our own species if we know we all come from the same place where that gigantic bush started? We have always been in an age of migration, whether it took 15,000 years to travel from the Congo to Europe or 12 hours to fly from Bosnia to New York. None of us is native of the place we call home.

The United Nations staff estimates that more than a billion people are on the march to something better somewhere else. One in seven human beings of our species are on their feet trying to escape war, poverty, violence, racial and homosexual persecution, corruption, political chaos, and fear. Will life be different when everyone realizes we are just members of one big unhappy family? Will life be different for the Bible and Koran thumpers and the 20,000 other religions that worship everything from Great Spaghetti Monsters to rattlesnakes? Scientific facts from DNA may turn some religious “facts” to “fake news.”

The war between Serbs and Muslims in the 1992 Bosnian War illustrates what different religious beliefs can do to members of the same African tribe. George Packer in the May “Atlantic” writes about how Bosnian Serbs treated their Muslim neighbors in an attempt to “cleanse” the country: “Men were separated into groups. Those whose names appeared on lists of local notables were taken away and never seen again. The others were sent to concentration camps, where they were starved and made to live in their own filth. The gunmen tormented their prisoners with tales of wives raped and children murdered. They ordered them to perform sexual acts on one another. They forced them to dig mass graves and fill them with the corpses of their friends, their kin. In some towns they killed every last Muslim. But the goal was everywhere the same: to make the place purely Serb, to render impossible for Bosnia’s different groups to live together ever again.”

Think of what has and what is happening in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Libya, Tunisia, and at least a dozen African countries. A billion people are voting with their feet while dying in oceans, rivers, and deserts. In Buddhist Myanmar (formerly Burma) over 900,000 Rohingya Muslims have been driven out of the country even though they have lived there since the 15th Century.

Fact: President Ronald Reagan Was A Closet Racist
It is wonderfully ironic that when Reagan co-starred with Peggy the chimp in the classic movie bomb “Bedtime for Bonzo,” he was acting with an African friend who shared 99 percent of the genes possessed by Reagan playing a psychology professor who wanted to teach Peggy human morals. Although Peggy never made it to the big time as Homo Sapiens, we must remember that there was only a difference of one percent. The movie’s goal was to help solve the “nature vs. nurture” posed by scientists. Having no desire to waste an hour watching a “B” movie or that great thespian Ronald Reagan, I have no idea how it turned out. But now we find out that Reagan was a closet racist pretending to be a nice guy loving everybody, including all those blacks from Africa. We finally have the goods on him based on a tape recording in the National Archives. His racial tirade has been covered up for 50 years.

AS Governor of California in 1971, he was infuriated that delegations from Africa did not agree with the U.S. position that the U.N. should recognize Taiwan as an independent state instead of being under Chinese control. He called President Richard Nixon, another well-known racist with his Southern Strategy, and said: “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Nixon responded: “Well and then they---the tail wags the dog, doesn’t it? The tail wags the dog.” I could ask: what the hell does that mean?

New York University history professor Tim Naftali, former director of the Nixon Presidential Library, battled to get the tape released. He expressed surprise at the audio: “It was worse than expected. It was the combination of the slur by Reagan and then Nixon’s repeating it, not once but twice in later conversations. This was not just revealing about what Reagan thought about Africans in 1971, and arguably later, it was also a reminder of how Nixon could hold racist views but not think of himself as a racist.” Later in a conversation with Secretary of State William Rogers, Nixon referred to the African delegations as “cannibals on television.” Remind you of someone who says he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body?

More Racist Views Of Reagan
Maybe Reagan’s Hollywood smile and his “gee-whiz” homey vocabulary convinced some Homo Sapiens he was not a racist. But his actions belie that. He started his 1980 presidential campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi at the county fair. This county was considered a stronghold of the Klu Klux Klan who killed three civil rights workers in 1964 and buried them by a dam. He told 10,000 white supporters that he believed in state’s rights, the code for racism. Bob Herbert of the New Times wrote about his speech: “He was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.

Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and tried to weaken it 1965. He opposed a national holiday for Martin Luther King. As president he tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. Reagan often spoke of the “shining city on a hill.” His city was reserved for whites who hired blacks as nannies, cooks, servants, gardeners, and janitors.

Maybe his shining city on a hill might survive in the future, but a recent World Bank study suggests that by 2050 more than 140 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America will be voting with their feet because of the catastrophic effects of climate change. About 160 million Americans live within 50 miles of the two oceans and the various gulfs. What happens if all the ice in Greenland melts? Hit the road, Jack!