"On Apples and Armageddon"
Reports of mankind’s extinction are greatly exaggerated...
by Joel Bowman
“If I knew that tomorrow the world would end,
I would plant an apple tree today.”
~ Martin Luther (attributed)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Where were we, dear reader? Ah, yes... the end of life on Earth as we know it. The absolute annihilation of our species. Simultaneously fascinating and terrifying, exhilarating and humbling, it is at least modestly reassuring to consider that the extinction of the human race is also the least common event in all known history. Sure, we’ve had our brushes with the great beyond... our eleventh-hour escapes... our flirtations with collective fate... but by hook or by crook, mankind has always managed to wiggle his way into the future. (Not individually, of course... on that count history is unequivocally not in our favor. As the late, great Jim Morrison famously said, “No one here gets out alive.”)
And yet, our morbid fixation with the end times makes a certain amount of sense. If we conceive of time as a kind of arrow (as opposed to, say, a circular formation, as favored by some of the Ancients, or as a sort of Nietzschean “eternal recurrence”), then we really are standing on the edge of history, the past at our backs and nothing but the unrealized future before us. Is it any wonder that, staring over the precipice, we might be prone to the occasional bout of apocalyptic vertigo, in spite of the overwhelming statistical improbability that we would be the first (and necessarily last) generation ever to read history’s final sentence? Some might even say that would be making a bit much of ourselves. All of which is not to suggest our forebears didn’t have a few close calls...
Apocalypse, Never! A genetic study conducted in 2023 suggests our distant ancestors went through a serious population bottleneck about 900,000 years ago, during which period our headcount whittled to just 1,280 “breeding individuals.” (That’s the number of specimens capable of reproducing, mind you, not a term for confused cavemen who identified as cavewomen or gender fluid “cavethems.” One doubts we would have made it this far had they been that lacking in basic intelligence.)
According to the study, published in Nature magazine, “The population didn’t expand for more than 100,000 years, after which it bloomed again and the progenitors of our species and of our extinct relatives, the Denisovans and the Neanderthals, emerged.” Phew!
But our forefathers weren’t out of the proverbial woods just yet. Fast-forward to “just” 70,000 years ago and the Sumatran volcano, Toba, threw forth fire and brimstone from the depths of the planet, ushering in a volcanic winter of the kind that would frighten Cormac McCarthy himself. Although researchers no longer consider it a “near extinction” event, our primitive progenitors probably dwindled in number to between 100,000 and 150,000. Uncomfortably close to celebrating Cousins Day on Valentine’s Day, in other words.
Speaking of close relatives, it was around 40,000 to 50,000 years ago that scientists reckon our remaining rival in the Last Man Standing competition was eliminated... or rather, absorbed. It was around this time that Homo floresiensis made his exit from the Indonesian island of Flores... and Homo luzonensis checked out from the Philippine island of Luzon... leaving Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis and the mysterious Denisovans (from whom, we assume, people named Dennis hail) to duke it out for top spot.
Being Human: Like these distinct “breeds” of humans, theories compete to explain how the smaller, weaker sapiens were able to better their Neanderthal relatives who, despite their name having since fallen into the pejorative “knuckle-dragger” realm, had already tamed fire, made sophisticated tools, hunted large animals, used pigments and fashioned decorative ornaments, and even buried their dead, at least in some circumstances. Researchers reckon climate, random demographic fluctuations, difficulty finding mates, inbreeding, and local catastrophes probably contributed to their end days. And yet, even our closest competitors didn’t disappear entirely.
Recent studies suggest something like 2–3% of the genome of most people with predominantly non-African ancestry is Neanderthal-derived. And it’s widely distributed among existing “gene machines.” The Max Planck Institute estimates that about 40% of the Neanderthal genome is represented somewhere among living humans today, even though any one person carries only a tiny percent. That’s approximately 20,000 consecutive human generations without a single extinction event, oftentimes despite our political overlords’ best efforts. Yes, yes, past performance doesn’t guarantee future results... but it’s not such a lamentable track record, is it?
“Ah,” we hear the crepehangers moan, “but what if you’re wrong, Joel?” Indeed. What if all of history, the tens of thousands of generations spanning hundreds of thousands of years, through ages of great wars and hard-won peace, times of plenty and times of want, of plague and blight, flood and drought, of fire and hail and common heartache... what if they’ve all led to this, the final denouement for mankind?
Leaving aside the breathtaking egocentrism required to place us, the present-day cohort, atop the incomparably vast expanse of human existence heretofore, the question remains: What if we knew that tomorrow the world would end? Then we plant an apple tree, dear reader. Not because we expect to enjoy its fruit, but because there is hope in the seed. Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World..."
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