They surmise the rocky ball of Earth is around 4 billion years old. A whole lot of stuff happened in the first 3.99 billion, some of it pretty interesting, including the crash of another planet into it which resulted in the Luna satellite. Plus the whole genesis-of-life thing.

But the most recent sliver of that vast time obsesses me most.

A mere 3 million Years Before Present, some apes morphed into precursors to what we we choose to call humanity. The genus Homo emerged.

At 2 million YBP, Homo erectus stretched upright and began to perfect the art of turning stone into tools. These things I’m telling you are guesswork and inference, based on the best available evidence, but as we get closer to the present, hypotheses can and will become theories, and theories will also evolve into facts; even into tentative certainties.

Half a million YBP: Homo heidelbergensis

A quarter million: The species H. sapiens

100,000: Out of Africa … 50,000: The so-named Great Leap Forward …

… and I start to get real interested.

10,000: semi-permanent camps become civilized ruts and we enter a state of Not-Anarchy; my interest wanes, because in my twisted unpopular view, this was the Great Stupid Leap Into Damnation.

We fell from Eden and grace only five-or-six-hundred generations ago.

Now we ‘need’ lawnmowers and labor rights and seven kinds of ‘insurance’ and fuel-burning vehicles, and rulers smokescreened off by ‘representatives’, and …

We are all, every one of us, fucking out of our motherfucking minds.