A Museum of Natural History memory

Circling back to one single dot to make a point

“Sit down and watch this”, Ellen said. We were in the American Museum of Natural History and after seeing a blue whale the size of the Hindenburg floating over our heads, walking through a giant beehive and floating over the creation of the cosmos from the Big Bang to the present I was ready to sit down.

Ellen said, “It’s about population growth. It’s almost over. It will start over again. You got to see this. See the dot?”

“What dot?”

“On the planet earth! Where Tucson is.”

I watched the video about human population growth a second time. Eons pass. I watched the dots begin to appear in Africa. And then the dots spread up into the middle east and dot by dot the parade of dots continues up through Europe, east across Asia and across the Bering Strait down into north America and then south America.

“See the dot where Tucson is? Watch it.”

“I see it. It was there a while.”

The lone dot persists out in the middle of nowhere in a desert as other dots parade onward and the Mayan civilization rises and falls and other dots pepper the plains and eastern America. Tucson’s dot is there long before the Roman Empire rises and falls, before the Dark Ages, before any dots spread from Europe to the English isles.

“Did you see that? Our dot was there before the beginning of modern history.”

Ice Age refugees operated a mammoth slaughterhouse that butchered wooly mammoths along the San Pedro 12,000-years ago.

The dot persists here in this river fed Eden until more dots arrive. And then the planet is covered with millions of dots that become billions of dots and the video preaches family planning and ends unhappily ever after and begins again a millennia ago in Africa with a single dot yearning to procreate and leave family planning to the giant apex predators who line their dens with the bones of slow running Homo erectus.

In 2016 I visited a dig by I-10 and Sunset Road and saw the footprints of adults and children that were at least 2500-3000-years-old. Dots thriving in this special amazing Eden, digging irrigation canals and raising little dots. An archaeologist showed me a tiny child’s toy they’d found. It was a clay doll the size of a small cigar. It had been decorated with a few simple lines yet the face was extraordinary. It was tiny smiling happy face smiling at me from a couple of thousand years ago. No doubt the work of a loving parent. A smile for a child from the time when this valley was an irrigated Eden at the heart of multiple trade routes. The sea shells confirm that. Dots begat dots and now there’s too many dots. Climate change will change that. The dots will scurry from the heat and once again we’ll be at the heart of multiple travel routes for warming refugees heading north and we will remain in our dot.

What’s a little heat? Humans have thrived here for thousands and thousands of years. Why not a few more?

Ellen wanted to know how many more times I was going to watch the video and if I was daydreaming. “Come on let’s go. You’re missing the cutaway views of different animal brains.” After watching the history of dots I was surprised to learn how large a human brain is. Surely we possess brains the size of almonds.