Now at 8:45 with the second load in the washer and my paper already bought and broken in! Yes, I am early today! This early has become a bit of an exception, as getting up at this time writing has become more frequent; but then, I go to bed around midnight.

The ‘Oroville Dam’ came into the news last night as the reservoir’s water is topping the dam and the spillways are below capacity. The dam was constructed between 1962 and 1968, which I remember well as I was working in construction in Toronto with Trist and Leeds Richardson.

The construction magazine at the time, reported that this dam was an earth fill dam, because that would give is some ’flexibility’ in its earth quake prone region of Northern California. It has a clay coffer dam at its core to prevent the reservoir water from making leak channels through its earthen body.

It is interesting to me that I feel invested with this dam and its history.

It is interesting to me that I feel invested with this dam and its history. It is also my history as I was making my way into Canadian and North American professional world. In 1963 I stayed a year out of ‘Engineering Skule’ - University of Toronto. Then, in 1968 I was married and we had a family with two sons, when the dam was completed and I was working on my Masters of Applied Science! A very important time span in my life now looking back at it, all triggered by the Oroville Dam’s news story and its construction story fifty years ago!

Last Sunday at the Palliser we had a good turn out with my friend Jack speaking on the theme of Valentine’s and weaving in quite a few events of his own life, which combined with his style made for quite a lively presentation.

This weekend I also established contact with Juliet’s niece Shahida in Ireland regarding the publication of Juliet’s ‘My Story‘. We both agree that time is important, as now that the full story has been written, the process can be speeded up towards publishing with photos and cover design coming to the fore.

Last Friday I had coffee with John at the Perk and met two of the principles of the little company he now works for. Later I met Shirley for a ‘Bouef Bourganion’ at the renovated ‘Good earth’ on 11th street SW. It had too much cayenne pepper and too little meat for the price. Shirley asked me when the first ‘man’ came into existence, which resulted in an extensive reply on my part.

The psych-pomp is a figure out of alchemy to which Jung often referred and which functions as the Alchemist’s guiding helper.

The interesting after affect of that discussion is that it made me realise that this little story also needs to become central to my narrative essay that I am working on right now. Shirley has been in the past and was here again my ‘psycho pomp’. That is a figure out of alchemy to which Jung often referred and functions as the Alchemist’s guiding helper.

Over the weekend I completed for each section of my Narrative essay the subject matter content, which consists of a collection of ideas to be addressed in each particular section of the essay. One such section deals with the topic of ‘The first Man’ or rather Human origins, the subject Shirley and I explored over our Friday lunch!
Now it’s time for the last washer load to go into the dryer at 10:15am and back at 10:26 and with that I conclude my diary for today.

First Man Narrative.

As we finished having our ‘Bouef Gardonnier’ Shirley said: “Here is a question I’ve always wanted to ask you: ‘Where did the first man come from?’ My half serious reply was: “From his mother’s womb.” “No, no! I mean form a Gorilla?” she said. “It would have to be from a Chimpanzee or a Bobono, they are the closest to humans in the DNA, about 97% shared. But, I say: Obviously a few percent make a big difference!” and this is how we got started exploring our human origin.

As I slowly dragged up earlier read sources and my own train of thought on this topic a kind of narrative unfolded that I will relate below, with a few elaborations here and there.

Jay Gould explains that the ape foetus has a human like late state, before it fully develops further into its final ape state and is born as a baby ape.

I started with recalling Jay Gould’s essay titled “The Premature Ape”. In it he explains that the ape foetus has a human like late state, before it fully develops further into its final ape state and is born as a baby ape. Gould also refers to a Dutch Physiologist in the then Dutch Indies, who had reported the same human like anatomical features of the ape foetus, before developing into a full ape state.

That human like ape late foetus state includes opposable thumbs, frontal sex position and human like pelvis position among several other such characteristics. That is about all I remember from that mentioned essay.

Years later I read “Deep Ancestry” by Spencer Wells and at about that time some new data on the earth’s temperature regimes going back about four (4) million years. It showed temperature fluctuations of about ten (10) dC over a periods of about ten thousand (10 000) years. The Globe and Mail of 2007-01-27/A6 published such a chart for the last four hundred thousand years. Both these charts showed a these temperature changes diminishing to a few degrees for the most recent ten thousand (10 000) years.

This stabilising period coincides with humans starting to practice agriculture! The latter chart also shows a rise in temperature of about nine (9) degrees about twelve thousand (12 000) years before present times. That is also the time that a big ice melt took place raising sea levels by about one hundred (100) meters.

But the climatic conditions changed too quickly to allow for genetic type adaptation to develop.

This reminded me off an article I read earlier, reporting a finding that tropical forests had existed in Europe’s Balkan region. We also know that such tropical forest regions have shrunk and expanded in the past and thus changing the habitat area of animals, including the tree living apes.

But the climatic conditions changed too quickly to allow for genetic type adaptation to develop. Migration may have taken place, but that would have meant retreating into already occupied habitat. Today we know that the biggest apes live in the deepest forest. This suggets that many apes at that time must have lived in distress as the trees became sparser due to those rapid climatological changes.

It is in such stress conditions that premature birth takes plac …

It is in such conditions that premature birth takes place among humans and I assume took place among the stressed ape population, giving rise to the pre-mature ape actually being born as a baby ape with the human like features as mentioned by Gould. From the record it appears that this devolutionary step did have survival value and I suggest that this is how the first humans came into existence as early born apes, but with non-tree type adaptations, equipping them for survival under changed circumstances.

The first such really successful pre-mature ape like human species is the Homo Erectus or ‘Johnny the Walker’ as I call that species as he and she travelled all the way to near Peking that we have records of, but never crossed the big waters. The next puzzle is that of the survival of the Sapiens species, which could be called ‘Johnny come Lately’, as both Erectus and then Homo Neander Valley preceded it in time.

The Erectus did have tools, but these stayed much the same over the millions of years …

An important clue for all three species is their tool making history. The Erectus did have tools, but these stayed much the same over the millions of years that it lived in the various continental regions of Eurasia. Some knew fire as is evident from caves near Peking in China. Erectus’ brain was about 600cc in size, though that may not have been as limiting a factor as once presumed.

The Neanderthaler lived for hundreds of thousands of years also with the same tools set as Homo Erectus, but had a brain equal in size to Homo Sapiens. Its body build was formidable and it must have been a formidable hunter. Homo Sapiens did not penetrate its region of Western Europe until late - ca 35ky ago.

I infer that the sapiens brain allowed better management of the amygdale’s emotion by means of the neo-cortex.

It is my guess that the Neanderthaler brain was specialised for the hunt in that its sense perceptions were superior to that of Sapiens, but that as family group they functioned in social isolation. Homo Sapiens we know is socially active, something that developed over time, learning to hunt in groups as the cave painting suggest.

I infer that the sapiens brain allowed better management of the amygdala’s emotion by means of the neo-cortex, which I think was either lacking or minimal in the Neanderthaler.

Be that as it may, the last camp fire of the Neander Valley man and species was found in Spain as sea level near Gibraltar, dating at 28ky ago. Since then, Homo Sapiens has been the one and only Homo species on this planet and has come to dominate it in just sixty thousand (60 k) years, which is a very short time compared to the time the other Homo species existed.
<7:30pm~