When we were kids our paternal grandfather told my five brothers and me about our Irish background. I remember hoping I didn’t come from a place called Limerick because limericks were bawdy and silly and not as grandiose as I aspired. We were told that a forefather dropped the ‘O’ from “O’Lay” because it sounded too Irish in the 1850’s when the country was flooded with Irish immigrants.
Growing up in the 60’s and 70’s with five story-loving brothers, the Irish family origin myth expanded. We reasoned that our distant fathers lived along the Lee River in County Cork because we would be ‘of the Lee’ which is close to the name “O’Lay”.
When I was thirty years old I was privileged to live and work in Ireland for a year and was accepted by the Irish people pretty much as family. Having an ear for its music, my speech started sounding Irish. After leaving Ireland, for the next two years my accent persisted to the point that new acquaintances assumed I was Irish.
Ten years ago one of my brothers paid for DNA genetic testing. He scanned the results for the percent of Irish in our blood: 3%. Three percent! How could that be? Other brothers confirmed this utter disappointment with their own tests.
I consider it a bit of a cosmic Irish joke that I used to have Irish ancestry.
I wanted to be Irish, or to have famous ancestors like Abraham Lincoln or European royalty because ultimately I feel basically inadequate. I have found that those who can legitimately claim some royal ancestor feel inadequate as well, but for different reasons. Perhaps this feeling of inadequacy is a consequence of living while our industrial culture unravels. Global warming and the extinction of many many species are happening this second - and I’m not doing enough to stop it. The feeling of not being enough is as pervasive as gravity.
Intact indigenous cultures which are mythologically connected to their land have often preserved their lineages and maintained specific relationships with their ancestors and their ecosystems. Europe was once home to many indigenous peoples. As ecosystems on planet Earth unravel it’s natural for Europeans like me to search for times when we lived more in balance with other species.
In the 2000’s Joanna Macy led groups of us through practices around “Dwelling in Deep Time”. My mind opened to consider vaster time scales. Accordingly, let me call humans who lived long before history “deep ancestors” whether or not they are technically kin. What were these deep ancestors like?
I devised a thought experiment and invite you to join me.
Imagine ancestors that lived before civilization, say long before agriculture began. But notice, there are no kings or queens, emperors or empresses, because all those are products of civilization. Let us go further into the past, so far that civilized roles are irrelevant. We proceed into translucent fields of “prehistory”, which reveal themselves through fascinating science families like paleontology, anthropology, archaeology and many others. Above all, I’m suggesting that we can connect with deep ancestors not through the intellect, but through our common heart. They were people like you and me: intelligent, curious, loving, creative and adaptive.
In this thought experiment, to help stabilize our imagination think of ancestors who did not stand out. Imagine our deep ancestors as ones who did not seek fame or power, who lived and died across a thousand generations. Think of people we’re taught to dismiss as average, boring, and unprogressive.
I expected that removing who I was conditioned to want my deep ancestors to be would limit its scope. The opposite occurred: it gave my imagination freedom to shift its viewpoint. Slightly untethered, my thought experiment lifted me out of my individuality.
That was a crucial realization: our deep ancestors were communal. They communed with each other and all beings around them. Knowledge accumulated and sustained them. They developed and maintained relationships with local plants and animals, especially those that fed and clothed them, as well as with the predators that fed on them.
How could any ecosystem adapt to thousands of years of natural changes (climate, precipitation, cataclysms, etc.)? Optimally the ecosystems themselves maintained communications between its subsystems, including humans. Our deep ancestors listened, learned, and implemented feedback loops that helped keep the whole healthy and handed them down.
To counter the heavy weight of so much reductive rational thinking in this world, let me indulge in a fantasy. My heart imagines our deep ancestors living so integrally that the ecosystems they were members of attained a state of climax. Slow times of no progress gave time for learning how to live beautifully in lands they left to their children’s children’s children. They were part of something larger than themselves, and their participation was essential to sustain it.
If this was so what was the event that interrupted the prehistoric climax? How ended the primordial golden age in Eurasia? Being a nobody, a non-specialist, a non-expert, I can make my bold suggestion with minimal risk of losing anything. I posit our ‘fall from Eden’ was caused by losing connections with other forms of intelligence. Species sometimes disappeared under our watch, or even by our own hands. (Mammoths, for example.) Languages naturally drifted apart. After enough inter-species communications ceased, most European human-participant ecosystems collapsed where their ways were forgotten, eventually decaying into what we generally know as civilization.
Humans have always lived among Earthly intelligences, but there is one in particular that is gone I wish to grieve. Our Eurasian deep ancestors lived among a particular species, a strong bodied animal which had a larger brain than theirs or ours and had lived far longer in the environments they shared: Homo neanderthalis.
Neanderthals lived in the same lands as Homo sapiens for thousands of years. They were not like us. They evolved independently for hundreds of thousands of years, and manifested their own ways of living on Earth. Neanderthals left millions of unique stone tools for scraping hides and ivory spears to hunt game, but nowhere is there evidence they made weapons for war.
It is not known how much Neanderthals associated with Sapiens. It’s safe to say that minimally, since our deep ancestors and Neanderthals maintained connections with their shared ecosystems they knew the impact of each other’s actions upon it. Yet I wonder if there was love between them. We know they sometimes had sex, producing lines of mixed species mothers. (Male babies could not reproduce.) Because humans are naturally curious suggests they may have played with one another. Almost every one of us has a few Neanderthal genes.
Living near such a kind of intelligence would make a difference to the lived experience of any human. Among other positive effects, It likely normalized recognizing intelligence in other species. If so, the effect of Neanderthal neighbors may have kept our deep ancestors awake to knowing their place on Earth.
Neanderthals vanished more than 30,000 years ago. Of course it’s total speculation that Neanderthal influence had a stabilizing effect on Sapien culture, but allow me to present the possibility. Imagine, a similar but profoundly different people who shared lands with us were suddenly gone. My conjecture is that Neanderthal extinction broke our deep ancestors’ hearts and they never properly mended. They drifted westward across Europe trying to fill the emptiness Neanderthals left and eventually crossed the sea and spread across the globe. Few species remained to remind Europeans they were not the only intelligent being or even the most intelligent. My ancestors began to focus on themselves as individuals more and more, eventually bringing the present situation of human caused destruction of many other species.
Joanna Macy was sensitive to the loss of species and wrote ‘The Bestiary’ - a list of the names of beings endangered or gone extinct. The list is growing ever longer. I suggest we add ‘Homo neanderthalis’ to it and learn how to grieve them all. The eulogy is forged from admiration, not pity. It celebrates how we all emerged and shared the world together for a time. In Coming To Life Joanna and Molly Brown warn us that guilt is useless because ‘it tends to close us down’. Instead, let’s make space in our hearts, speech, and minds for the future to reimagine itself, whatever emerges.
As it turns out I’m 1% more Neanderthal than I am Irish! When I worked in Shannon, County Clare with a team of brilliant Irish engineers one of them told me of Cuiveen O’Laois, my Irish name-brother from south of Dublin. Looking back, it didn’t matter what DNA I thought I carried, I felt at home in the sincerity of the Irish welcome. These days it’s easy to forget that humans generally, naturally, get along and can even enjoy life with strangers. Although my inherited genetics turned out to be mostly English and Slovak, my fleeting Irish ancestry made for a good yarn.
References
Slimak, Ludovic (2024). The Naked Neanderthal. A New Understanding of Human Culture.
Pegasus Books.
Sykes, Rebecca Wragg (2022). Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art. Bloomsbury
Sigma.
Sahlins, Marshall (2022). The New Science of the Enchanted Universe. An Anthropology of Most of Humanity. Princeton University Press
Macy, Joanna and Brown, Molly Young (2014). Coming Back To Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects. New Society Publishers.
It seems that the search for ancestry is actually a search for orientation, a way to feel placed within a long continuity with past and future. Your thought experiment shows how identity can widen when we imagine ourselves inside deeper time. Very powerful!