There are lions and tigers
and leopards;
there are horses and donkeys and zebras;
coal tits and blue tits and great
tits.
Every genus should have its species
but there are people and
no one.
This was a family tree with many twigs:
Homo ergaster with
his unvarying stone blade;
Homo heidelbergensis patient for
his giant elk;
but for each species not in our direct line
there was a single last person
slipping
from their own specific version of consciousness,
crying out bestial syllables
in an ape-haunted dream of dying.
And about the last
of the twigs:
Java Man squatting among the cinders in his lair;
the mystical Neanderthals,
solemn at the graveside;
there is some disagreement
between the experts on our Genesis
as to the exact date of their vanishing,
some thirty or forty thousand
years ago,
not long after we fell
into our words, our cunning, our sapience.
Or so it was thought till Homo floresiensis,
the
newly discovered female specimen,
made small by the pragmatic demands
of small islands,
a separate human species far more recent
than any other Other,
which walked the Earth even as we did
and was killed, perhaps, in a volcanic
explosion.
A volcanic explosion? Yeah, right.
Imagine the sport of running
the little fellers to ground,
laughing like the school team at their hopeless
determination, thrashing
under capture.
Now, the floor of the cave is sectored
by an exacting
grid of taut string.
Every shard has its unique numerical reference
and what these hunters
of bone dry facts have,
in their meticulous way, uncovered
is an abstract thought,
is the original murder,
is the mark of Cain.
© 2005
See also:
Article
on Homo floresiensis
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