The Living Universe - Duane Elgin [53]
Because the hero’s journey so powerfully describes a widely recognized path of development, we can use this archetype to get a sense of where we are on our collective journey. Let’s look more carefully at our long journey of separation, the supreme test of our species, and our journey of reunion.
Humanity’s Journey of Separation
Humans physically like ourselves have existed for at least 150,000 years. However, our lineage almost died out about 70,000 years ago, when a period of abrupt climate change produced extreme hardship for our species. A massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia appears to have been the precipitating event. Sometimes called the “Toba catastrophe,” this mega-colossal eruption—the largest in the past 2 million years—produced 3,000 times more ash and smoke than the 1980 eruption of the Mount St. Helens volcano. To indicate the magnitude of the Toba eruption, thousands of miles away much of India was covered with nearly six inches (fifteen centimeters) of volcanic ash. The resulting haze blocked the Sun, cooled the atmosphere, and triggered a severe ice age that lasted a thousand years or more and may have produced the bottleneck in human evolution.3 Geneticists now estimate that between 1,000 and 10,000 humans in southern Africa survived this catastrophe. A few thousand humans who survived (perhaps from a single village or locale) provided the gene pool from which the entirety of modern humanity derives. These ancestors went their separate ways out of Africa to populate the planet. Now, 70,000 years later, their descendants are encountering one another once again—but this time as a family approaching 7 billion! What a remarkable story of survival and success.
Necessity being the mother of invention, the extreme hardship of this time led to an evolutionary leap in human reflection and creative action. It was in the years following this catastrophe that physically modern humans made their first great migrations out of Africa—first to the Middle East and around the coastline of India, across Indonesia, and on to Australia. Fifty thousand years ago, another wave of humans made the journey to the north and settled in what is now Europe. These two streams of migration eventually brought humans into North America roughly 15,000 years ago, and then on into Central and South America.
Stepping back, we can summarize our evolutionary journey in a single sentence: We awoke as hunter-gatherers with a revolution in self-perception 35,000 years ago, a revolution in farming and village life blossomed 10,000 years ago, the urban-industrial revolution began approximately three hundred years ago, and the communications revolution that is now enveloping the Earth began about fifty years ago. Let’s review these major blocks of human experience so we can get our bearings for the journey ahead.
Roughly 35,000 years ago, we became consciously aware of our bodily existence and, with a sensing consciousness, we made a dramatic leap forward in our ability to develop tools, personal ornaments, and trading networks. It appears that we awoke from the numbing sameness of life to pursue a higher calling—a greater possibility in living that expressed itself in cave art, flutes made from bone, necklaces made from teeth and shells, burial of the dead, and more. In this call to adventure, the tests and learning were very close because life was experienced with such immediacy. Social organization was on a tribal scale, and our sense of identity