Right after first seeing those two perfect pictures of the
golden aspens against the blue peaks of the Tetons which set the October theme on the main
page of this forum, I came across the following passage in a book by Spencer Wells, Deep
Ancestry. Wells is a scientist in the Human Genographic Project who is studying how
genetic markers we all carry can trace back to the original overlapping waves of human
migration out of Africa, across Asia and into Australia, the Americas and Europe:
One of the most amazing sights in the western United States is the flush of fall colors
in the Rocky Mountains. Groves of quaking aspen trees interspersed with pines and firs
cover the mountainsides, their leaves shimmering in the breeze. As the days shorten and
the nights grow cool, the trees begin to change color as the life-giving green chlorophyll
retreats into the deeper tissues, leaving the other pigments predominant and turning the
leaves a bright yellow color.
An aspen-covered hillside in the early fall is certainly beautiful, but if you look
closely enough you will notice an odd phenomenon: the patchiness of the changes. Some
contiguous stands of trees will have changed color, while other trees nearby are still
green. While this could be caused by tiny variations in the microclimate--shadier, cooler
sections of the topography, for instance--the true reason reveals fascinating details about
aspen biology.
Aspens, it turns out, are amoung the largest organisms on Earth. Not each individual
tree, of course--the giant sequoias of California easily top them on a trunk-by-trunk
basis--but rather the entire linked organism. Theis massive plant can include hundreds or
even thousands of connected aspen trunks that are bound toghether by subterranean runners.
The largest documented aspen grove covers two hundred acres, weighs 6,600 tons, and is
estimated to be more than 10,000 years old. As the aspens mature, they send out a runner
to start another trunk if they sense another section of the mountain is getting better
sunlight. The aspens repeat this process again and again as they slowly creed undreds of
yards from where they originated. Despite their widespread range, all of the seemingly
unrelated trunks do spring from a common source.
In much the same way, we can find connections that link apparently unrelated clans into
larger and larger "superclans." Ultimately by digging down far enough in the genetic soil,
they all spring from the same source. If we go back far enough, all humans share a common
ancestor at some point in the past.
So these pictures of aspens are not only seasonal, and beautiful nature images, and
mementos of our film, they are symbols of what we all share beneath the soil.
People really are one, we have spread generation to generation across the planet
from tiny bands of the first homo sapiens in Africa. Sometimes it is a scientist studying
how, when and where the human journey happened who makes us think about
what we share with folks around the world.
And sometimes it is an exchange at Bettermost, a daisy chain of associated thoughts
about this or that topic, added on to first by this and then by that person among us.
All originally spun off a film which has now become a sort of shared and
often-nearly-but-never-really forgotten ancestral memory for those of us who come to this forum.
