Notes from Maine - 2021/11/14
My friend had his Thanksgiving party at my house yesterday. It was nice to get back to that tradition, although it was a much smaller affair compared to previous years. Better than last year—last year everyone just chatted over Zoom.
Yesterday, I was sitting in the midst of three conversations at one point. The food was all gone. Dishes were stacked in the kitchen for later people to worry about. Kids were in the back of the house, leaving doors open and lights on in every room. It was just a chattering moment of friends catching up on details from the last twenty-four months.
For an instant I remembered what it was like to be a little kid. There was always that time when we were told to get ready to leave, but the parents were still talking, talking, talking. From a kid’s perspective, the subject matter couldn’t have been more boring. Car trouble, a leaky roof, supplier issues at work, or the prices at the grocery store—who could ever think that these things were interesting to discuss, sitting around and empty table in a dining room that’s slightly uncomfortable from the body heat of too many people?
It turns out that all of us thought that these were perfectly interesting topics. I’m not excluding myself. I mean, I could remember being a kid, tugging on Mom’s sleeve. There was nothing worse than being told we had to get ready to go and then stand around while they continued to talk. But, now, it was perfectly lovely to sit around and appreciate all the things we have in common.
That’s when I starting thinking about epigenetics and the Toba catastrophe. This is an idea that I’ve been flirting with in books for years. In the Extinct series, I think I suggested that the Toba catastrophe was actually a failed colonization attempt of an alien species. I’m thinking of it differently now.
I don’t research things very carefully—I prefer to have a cursory understanding of history/science and then I make up my own details to fit my fictional narrative—but here’s how I understand it…
Environmental stresses and pressures (a famine, for instance) can change how our offspring’s genes are expressed. So, while genetics will dictate the eye color of a child, epigenetics can change the life expectancy of grandkids of a person who experiences a famine during puberty. It’s weird stuff. Here’s one of the studies I read: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07617-9
With that in mind, consider the theory of the Toba catastrophe. Geologists tell us that there was a super volcano eruption about 75,000 years ago in Sumatra. This correlates with a genetic bottleneck where it appears that the human population was reduced to 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs (Wikipedia, if you care to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory). With such a small population, I think it would have taken a very tight-knit social structure for humans to recover. I picture the survivors of the volcanic winter coming together and working cooperatively to grow the population again.
It makes me wonder what people were like before that volcano.
Maybe they weren’t all that social. Maybe they wouldn’t have sat around a dinner table, talking about the details of their life. I wonder if our need for social interaction is a survival mechanism left over from a time when humans were nearly wiped out by a natural disaster.
If that’s the case, maybe a different kind of environmental pressure—for example, having 7 billion of us knocking around—could make us change again. In a few generations, I wonder if we’ll be antisocial. Perhaps the birthrate will drop significantly. Birthrate in the US has been dropping steadily for a decade. China has experienced a fertility collapse. India, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Indonesia are all reporting birthrates that aren’t high enough to sustain their current populations. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I believe that the world is currently overpopulated, but it makes me wonder what type of people will inhabit this planet in a few generations.
Is it possible that our current level of social interaction isn’t sustainable?
Anyway, I thought about these things as I sat around the table yesterday. I wasn’t able to express myself succinctly in the moment, which is always the case.
I believe I said something like, “I miss boredom.”
It’s the same sentiment to me, but I got some weird looks from around the table. I think people thought I was accusing them of being boring? What I was really trying to say was, “It’s nice to sit around and chat with friends, but I wonder if our affinity for small talk comes from a time when humans almost disappeared from the planet.”
Hope you’re well, and I hope you still get chances to catch up with friends.
