ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 8, 1996 TAG: 9602080098
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Why Things Are
SOURCE: JOEL ACHERNBACH
Is there a point to our existence? How did we get here and what are we supposed to do with ourselves? Why should we do anything? Why bother?
These are some big, hairy, knuckle-dragging questions, but we think we have an answer, a very good answer, bordering on the irrefutable. It may suffer from being not entirely comprehensive, but it'll have to do, because this is our last column, and at sundown we dynamite the Why bunker.
The key to the answer is: The Bering land bridge.
About 25,000 years ago, during one of the Ice Ages, sea levels dropped so dramatically that the water receded from the Bering Strait, leaving only dry land. It became possible to walk from Siberia to Alaska.
And so people did. They walked to a new continent. For a while they were stymied in Alaska by a glacial ice wall, an impermeable barrier. They chilled out for about 10,000 years. Then the glaciers melted a little. Gaps appeared in the ice wall. The first Americans went south.
According to Bill Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Studies Center of the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, archaeologists have found tools in southernmost South America that are roughly as old as the tools found in places like the Pacific Northwest. You know what that means: People rapidly explored and inhabited all of the Americas.
(We almost wrote ``The Americas were rapidly inhabited,'' which would use the kind of awful, passive voice that infects the average textbook and makes students think everything that happens is predictable, inevitable, and of course boring, like in a stock market report where they say ``Trading was moderate.'')
These Asian-American hunters went everywhere, over mountains and across deserts, through the isthmus of Panama, atop the Andes, down the Amazon, out to Caribbean islands - an unbelievably dramatic, but forgotten, Age of Discovery.
Now you should ask yourself: Why did these people make the journey? If they were so antsy, why didn't they head south directly from Siberia and go someplace warm, like Thailand?
The simple answer: There were animals here, and no people. The hunting was fabulous! And no one told them to go away. It was doable, and so it was done. Life fills every environmental niche; humans can adapt to almost any landscape.
The Bering land bridge saga inspires us to come up with an initial, if superficial, summary of why we are here: Because we can be.
We're just doing what we can!
Then again, when you wake up in the morning, and are faced with the decision of how you are going to be industrious and decent and fashion a credible existence, you don't say to yourself that you are going to fill some environmental niches. You seek something more. Your plans are grander.
We'd bet that the first Americans felt the same way. Imagine the reaction of the first human being to walk into Yosemite Valley, the first to hear the roar of Niagara Falls, the first to walk the beaches of Jamaica. They must have been awed.
Keep in mind that these hunters were, biologically, modern human beings. They had as much ability to feel wonder, reverence, and fear as anyone today. They were us!
The Why staff likes to think that not so much has changed: That the world is still full of new terrain. Every one of us is voyaging from an old world to a new one. Call us dreamers! But it's how we feel.
There are new Yosemites out there for all of us.
And this, we think, is ultimately why we are here: We are part of a journey. It's the journey of a single species with a weirdly large brain. (What an oddball adaptation. It's almost as strange as those tiny male suckerfish who disintegrate except for their testes. Remember that column?)
In a world thriving with creatures living off instinct, human beings are a bizarre and thrilling experiment in intelligence and emotion. Human existence is a gift. We honor our good evolutionary luck every time we tap our noggin and think. How rare is the power to do something as simple as the imagining of tomorrow! The human mind is surely one of the Seven Wonders of the Known Universe (along with the rings of Saturn, the Crab nebula, the supergiant star Betelgeuse, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, the Automatic Teller Machine and the ready-to-eat instant Salad Kit.)
We are going to resist the temptation to get all weepy and blubbery and quivery-chinned about this being our last column, but we have to give thanks to our editor, Gene Weingarten, who, though a madman, is one of the great unsung geniuses in American journalism; to Alan Shearer, who steered us away from too much incomprehensible physics; to Anna Karavangelos, Bill Dickinson, Jan Harrod, Heather Green, Suzanne Whelton, Mary Fleming, Grace Hill and Geoffrey Johnson of The Washington Post Writers Group; and to the countless people who have served nobly on the Why staff or as invaluable sources, including Mary Stapp (the Why goddess), Tom Shroder, Peggy Hackman, Bill Smart, Brian Dickerson, Pat Myers, Mary Hadar, Katherine Wanning, David Jackson, Dana Hull, Cristina Dragomirescu, Elizabeth Schandelmeier, Bebe Gribble, Jeanne Smith of the Library of Congress, Bob Park, LeRoy Doggett, and especially Richard Thompson, the Michelangelo of cartoonists, whose drawings we relied on to carry us when we weren't funny enough or, you know, writing good enough.
And most of all thanks to our readers, for supporting the column, asking great questions, catching our mistakes, making us think. You created, with your curiosity, a market for our little column, with its mix of fact and humor and total nonsense. You made the world safe for the question Why.
Keep reminding yourself: Every time you read a book, or take a class, or write a poem, or watch a sunset, or teach something to a child ... every time you love someone or find something beautiful ... every time you advance, however incrementally, the cause of intelligent civilization ... every time you pump a little warmth into this big, cold universe ... you illustrate the real reason why we are here. You solve the mystery. You don't need to ask anymore.
You know the answer.
- Washington Post Writers Group
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