Dear Editor, 

Everything changes everything. One of my favourite pastimes is watching videos about ancient history. Way, way back history. The clickbait headlines often read, “This changes everything.” Actually, everything changes everything that follows. We seem to be on a one-way timeline, and everything we do has consequences that cannot be undone. 

Evolution is the mechanism through which nature decides which life form is best suited to the present state of affairs. It’s subtractive sculpture. Dinosaurs were the best adapted for a hundred million years.  One huge asteroid changed the environment so drastically that 97 per cent of life forms were starved or frozen in the unending winter.  All that remains now are crocodiles and birds. Yes, look at hummingbirds, chickens, cassowaries and emus, etc. Oh, and there were some little tarsier-looking creatures that lived underground and required very little food, that were the parents of all mammals, including us. 

Recently (within the last few decades) archaeologists have unearthed remnants of cultures twice as old as were previously thought to have existed. The going theory was that agriculture developed and made it possible for hunter-gatherers to settle in one place. Gobekli Tepe, in Turkey, was built, used, abandoned and buried around 12,000 years ago, before agriculture. Archaeologists wondered how that could be. 

Even more recently, scientists have uncovered a nearby site where stone walls were built to funnel herds of antelope into pens, thus ending the wanderers’ eternal quest for something to eat. They gathered and ground wild grains and made beer. Now that they had the means to stay in one place, they learned the full cycle of plant life, and began sedentary agriculture. 

So here we are, humans are rulers of the Earth. A minuscule portion of humanity works the land and herds, feeding the rest of us, who are free to ponder the inevitable and beyond. Lucky us.  We are cumulatively altering our environment, toward a time when all reality will be on screens, and we won’t need food or companionship at all. Does that sound like heaven? Not to me. 

Robert Wills, Shawville and Thorne