This is Don's "Whom We Might Be" Story

The page shares some key events that I encountered since my early life, a look back in time to things that occurred "before" me and some "future" thoughts; finally, a visit to my profile will share some of my personal info… Enjoy!

With likely no plans near the end of the year prior to my birth, my parents had clearly connected & an unfertilized egg (en rout through her fallopian tubes) encountered one of my Dad’s sperm, bringing me into existence…
    (and yes, there’s *no* supporting data for this event, other than my DOB & a low birth-weight!)

At the creation of this story in April 2016, I was blessed to have lived for 60+ years (about 17,520,000 hours since my birth) during a timeframe that coincidentally ran over the intersection of two Full Millennia (1,000’s & 2,000’s) and with luck (& some medical help!) I do hope to live on into the 2080's… Will also share that it was *extremely* good luck that my life didn't begin several hundred years earlier, as I will share later in the story!

The paternal family name of Shave has evolved over several hundred years, most likely from Northern Germanic surnames such as "Schave;" no-one of that name is (yet!) in my tree data… similar spellings include "Stave" / "Shade" / "Shane" / "Shake" / "Shack" / "Shaver" / "Schave" / "Shive" / “Shaw” and "Shadel." A source for my name is in the Oxford Dictionary of British Family Names © 2016, Oxford University Press, the most comprehensive research resource I could find, containing more than 45,000 surnames

Looking "outside” of myself for a minute, each of us were actually made from Ancient Stardust, a scientific theory that I strongly believe to be true! Am continuing to search for answers about the start of all life as well as its’ end…

    1) Assuming that the Big Bang was an actual fact (which I do), what caused the occurrence of the Singularity
          about 13.8 billion years ago? More on this below… The USA standard for 109 is used here; see a reference?

    2) Why did we not begin evolving until quite some time after the extremely nasty Hadean Eon period?

    3) How (and from where?) did the early Earth actually get its bazillions of gallons of water?

    4) What *actually* caused life on Earth (after the arrival of water) to form 541-million years ago with the start
          of the Cambrian period?

    5) How might our Universe end, and when?

Theories abound for such hard-to-answer thoughts (and for others!) and are frequently in my mind…

History shares that our past Homo Sapiens humans (an estimated ~116 billion) are gone:

with 7+ billion humans today (see note 1/“backspace” returns); 3 key factors drive future growth: population, prosperity & climate change. We can anticipate that there will be between ~9.8 & ~10.4 billions of us in 2-3 generations, with most of the increases in Africa & in Asia, with many difficulties around water availability and other future complexities.

To return from looking "outside of myself," the conceptual creation of our human “ancestral tree” is that it took root about 12- or 13-million years ago when a female Great Ape in Africa became our “GGG-Grannie” (yes, with many GG's!) whom I shall name (from the Greeks) "Pappoús"…
    As a brief aside, while this idea can only ever be "a theory" until science advances further, discovering more in the future,
      I happen to personally support this concept very deeply!
    My views here are from the logical assessment of what the "very top of our tree" would have actually looked like, a set of threads from
      Charles Darwin's concepts about the evolution of humans, & an improved view of all life from Richard Dawkins; details are shared below

To continue, Ms. Pappoús (who sadly remains unknowable, other than by my speculative assessments) is Richard Dawkins' “Concestor 1” as shared in his book "The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life" ( note 3b )…
She is our "Common Mother," who birthed two daughters (amongst many other presumed children) without any kind of religious marriage or rings for her fingers, nor any baptisms for her children…
    Such religious references, thoughts & comments throughout are *exclusively* my opinion

One of her daughters (whom I'll name "Baba") became the first Mother of today's Chimpanzees & another daughter (whom I'll name "Gigi") became the first Mother of “Homo Earlicus”…

Gigi's offspring then evolved, branching & spreading out from what has been established as their original home in the Eastern Rift Valley of Africa (with other possible locations) across the world ( note 2 ) where as many as ~315,000 years ago (vs. 190,000) when our ancestral tree branch, Homo Sapiens, started out… a detailed view of our human prehistory is here; also watch this PBS report for an African perspective? Interestingly enough, mitochondrial DNA (thru our mothers, note 2c) can be traced back to the start of our tree branch & possibly further. An evolution map is attached to my online profile (view the image/etc in the "Story" event), showing who we once were, & where we once lived…

Many other threads surrounding Ms. Pappoús' descending familial tree line are caught below in my timeline.

The geologic ancestors of Ms. Pappoús are a fascinating story… Richard Dawkins wrote one of the best books
( note 3a ) that I've ever read, sharing the idea that we are descended from many, many "Concestors" which he defines (on p.7 of his book) as:
      "[…] in a backward chronology, the ancestors of any set of species must eventually meet at a particular
      Geologic moment… the last common ancestor that they all share, what I shall call their 'Concestor' […]"
making his book a very worthy tale!!

Some key points of the "evolution of us" are (a) our 4 fingers/thumb on each hand (with which I typed out this story!) from the fins of a fish, (b) a pair of eyeballs (with which you're currently reading this!) & (c) how we became 2-legged upright walkers. We normally think very little of these things (unless we happen to be hammering on a nail & missing [ ouch ! ] or catching some dust with one of our eyes), yet these are both *extremely* early developments, far, far before "Concestor 1" - fish & other creatures had fins & eyes a very, very long time before they left the ocean for the land, which had been created ~530 million years ago, allowing plants to colonize the bare earth over ~125 million years which in turn allowed fish to come ashore ~30 million years later…

These threads (and many other attributes) are shared in an interesting documentary video, "Your Inner Fish" by one of the PBS stations in the US of A on April 9, 2014 ( note 3c ), which shares the idea that we evolved from that little fish that climbed up out of the water, perhaps 375 million years ago…

My 3rd thought (above) on how we as a species learned to walk upright ( note 3d ) on two legs vs. our 4-legged ancestral apes is from that skull of a small 10-million-year-old ape (named "Rudapithecus Hungaricus") that had been found & documented in 1985; a more recent complete skeleton was also found near an old mining town in Rudabánya, Hungary, Central Europe, which is known for its picturesque turquoise-blue quarry water. The find shared the pelvic structure, a rare skeletal event, that led to more & better insight into the ancestors of African apes and humans which had been assessed as walking on two legs 6 or 7 million years ago ( note 3e )

While this "story of us" actually began an enormously long time ago (by our human standards), many ancient activities & events have been understood & validated by our current scientists & their predecessors.

Today's knowledge of our Universe ( note 4a ) suggests that a "Big Bang" (aka a Singularity, note 4b) created all of the initial basic matter around 13.8 billion years ago, and although only an estimate (with nothing but scientific guesses) it may all simply evaporate with the expansion of normal & dark matter at the very end of time!

Our star, the Sun (on the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy) self-ignited ( note 5 ) about 4.6 billion years ago, subsequently creating our planets… this included the Earth, which, with all of it’s water allowed life as we know it
( note 6 ) to begin about 3.5 billion years ago.

The intervening years (prior to the arrival of Dawkins' "Concestor 1") are filled with simply incredible things…

as well as many, many others…

The evolution of us as humans ( note 9 ) allowed for the beginnings of an improved brain about 2.5 million years ago, when our ancestors, "Homo Habilis" came along… Our Cerebral Cortex had already been expanding for quite some time but the arrival of “Broca's area” in the frontal lobe was the key to better communication, a way to improve human speech from "grunt-grunt-grunt" to "Hey, get me that beer?" (yes, they likely had something like Mead back then!) as well as pretty much everything that existed for them. The Broca's area is also the most likely basic cause of the species change to "Homo Erectus" and later, to us, Homo Sapiens…

A little further back in time, "Lucy" (a great-great-…grandchild of Gigi's) was a hominid that lived in the Rift Valley of East Africa ( note 12a ) more than 3 million years ago, where she was discovered. Also see the older find?
In November of 1974, anthropologist Donald Johanson caught the glint of a white fossilized bone out of the corner of his eye at Hadar, Ethiopia & recognized it as a hominin, becoming famous; Richard & Mary Leakey have also done significant work in this region.

The multiple threads of "who was related to whom" (or “who begat whom”) during these distant past years continue to be highly debated, with no apparent prayers or religious events occurring for any of them… A related thought here is the "bottleneck" of our entire species when a super-volcano ( note 10 ) in present-day Lake Toba (Sumatra, Indonesia) blew itself to smithereens about 75,000 years ago, bringing the pool of human mating pairs down to less than 1,000 couples… we were almost completely wiped out.

The people that became "us" evolved from cave-dwellers, breaking stones into tools and moving away from the Rift Valley (perhaps 1.5 million years ago), where the use & control of fire to cook their hunted meats all started.

Neanderthal people ( note 12b ) existed for about 400,000 years in Europe with no apparent religious tokens or perspectives; they were estimated to have been a highly-thoughtful race of people, with far larger brains than ours. While they were still around 50,000 years ago (there is fossil evidence), their final extinction arrived near to that time; no-one really knows why or how, just that they are gone, possibly killed or cross-bred with us…

A thread of our ancient artworks was the discovery of a pair of 2-inch rock slivers by Christopher Henshilwood’s team in the Blombos caves (180 miles east of Cape Town, Africa) in 1999/2000. The 2 red-ochre stones each have etched symbolic patterns & are from 77,000 years ago, currently reported by Archaeologists as the oldest works of art in the world. The rock art is twice as old as the Stone Age cave paintings (below), clearly demonstrating that humans living at this time possessed modern patterns of thought.

Another is the Stone Age cave paintings, a part of the ancient works of art ( notes 11 & 12c ), found in Southern France & in other places (with no actual religious specificity, although they are clearly cultural in nature) that date back roughly 40,000 years ago (scientific analysis of the art); they were often "signed" by stenciling the hand of the author, exactly like yours and mine! One of these males (another great-great-…-grandchild of Gigi's) was one of our individual GGG-Grandfathers, perhaps 2,500 generations back.

Another fascinating cultural discovery was the earliest known representation of the hand-held-sized female “Venus figurines” around 29,000 years ago — most commonly found in the Gravettian area in the French Upper Périgordian, the Czech Pavlovian, and the West Russian Kostenkian. The figurines each include a downturned head with no face, thin arms which end at (or cross over at) the breasts, voluminous breasts and buttocks, a prominent abdomen (interpreted as pregnancy), tiny and bent legs, and pegged (or unnaturally short) feet. They vary in proportions, and it is still debated if this is due to material choice or if they were intentional design choices; it is suggested that Eastern Europeans Venuses have an emphasis on the breasts and stomach, whereas Western European ones emphasise the hips and thighs.

The people described above moved across Europe (& around the planet) during the hundreds of thousands of years of the Stone Age, evolving from cave-dwelling hunters to a life of wandering gatherers, knapping flints & obsidian for skinning & cutting, grinding antlers & bones into sharp tools to sew and assist with our lives, managing our fires and poking saber-tooth tigers, cave bears and their ilk in the eye to survive and become us…

During the Upper Paleolithic around 30,000 years ago, the “Last Glacial Maximum” occurred, allowing the glaciers to start shrinking to free up our existence, rock-painting traditions began in Bhimbetka, India (which presently is the densest-known concentration of rock art) where about 800 rock shelters contained paintings and the earliest ovens were found — our civilization began.

Our survival of the Quaternary Ice Ages (2.5 million years ago) was simply the key to our roots… The most recent Ice Age ended around 18,000 years ago, bringing the start of the Neolithic Age to us 12,000 years ago & creating the first “Agricultural Revolution" ( note 13a ). This was where today's world of farming & animal husbandry (with no apparent plan or guidance, especially not from some "Supreme Being") began about 11,500 years ago in the "Fertile Crescent" ( note 13b ), an ancient region between the Tigris & Euphrates Rivers in modern-day Iraq, and in parts of Kuwait, Syria, Turkey & Iran.

Cultural ideas (Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism & other religious entities) begin to appear in this part of the world. The Christianic concept of a "Fertile Crescent" is in the first threads to appear in the chapter of Genesis from today's Bible: "God had planted a Garden in the East, in Eden"… Near to Eden is a religious place named "Göbekli Tepe" ( note 13c ) with circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars, which are today the world's oldest known megaliths; they are scientifically dated to 11,300 years ago. Stonehenge (close to where I was born) was built around 5,000 years ago, and there are nearby Mesolithic astronomical sites that date back to 10,000 years ago. A written collection of Hindu religious texts & hymns also began in India around 2,800 years ago.

Today, a third of all of the world's people (about 3 billion are Christian ( note 13d ), especially those in & around Rome, Italy; a quarter are Islamic, “submission to the will of God”; 16% are Atheists (where I am counted) and 15% follow Hinduism… many other smaller groups fill the remaining 10% or so.

Moving on from my historical religiosity, our species spread across the world through the Neolithic Ages, creating the Bronze Age by their discovery of melting copper & tin together ( note 14 ) about 5,000 years ago. These people also found a better way towards the end of the Neolithic Ages (with no apparent religious guidance) to move their crops & such around more easily: the wheel ( note 14d )… this facilitated the arrival of so many of our things! They must have spent several wheel-less millennia before this as they farmed… early wheels came from the use of tree-trunks that the builders of Stonehenge (above) and the Pyramids used for “rolling” the huge stones.

The Bronze Age ended quite precisely 3,200 years ago, caused by an onslaught of drought, famines, earthquakes & volcanoes ( note 14b ), allowing the Iron Age to begin… Our ancestral blacksmiths went on to learn how to crank up their furnaces, small chimneys made of clay (using charcoal and pumping air into the fire) to smelt Iron & Steel
( note 15 ), facilitating the slaughter of people across the world by our armored leaders & the like who walked, marched and rode huge war-horses wielding their swords.

Today's transportation on trains, boats, planes, cars, our bicycles & pushing our kids around in their perambulators would not exist without the discoveries of the wheel & Iron/Steel, nor would our skyscrapers, bridges, those rocket ships & space-based places and other monumental structures that are also part of our future exist at all.

Coming forwards a little, an incredibly important invention for humans occurred around 3,000 years ago: the arrival of Sumerian writing ( note 16 ), where thoughts became more permanent than stories told around our fireplaces. We also wouldn't be typing stories like this one, nor planning out how to best design & deploy our recent journeys to the Moon without writing!!

The fabulous & famous Roman Empire appeared 2,750 years ago, lasting until their downfall in 480. Roman troops, highly skilled & organized, plundered, raped and captured people as slaves as the Empire expanded across Europe. They built Rome, Constantinople & other cities, and created hundreds of long, straight and permanent Roman roads (some of which can still be seen & are in use), totaling 250,000 miles, as well as the 73-mile long Hadrian's Wall (just south of the border with Scotland) which was built "to keep the Northern barbarians away".

Roman builders determined how to use aqueducts to bring fresh water from the mountains to their villas, to bathe & to drink, and how to make slaves do all of the work that was needed for the rich & beautiful senate leaders.

The Roman Empire also caused a massive religious event that changed the world for us 2,000+ years ago, where their political slaughter of "Jesus of Bethlehem" by the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, created the start of the Christian religious faith. The story has him hung on a cross (for unproven crimes against the state) with a “crown of thorns” and a Roman sword “thrust into his side” at the top of the Golgotha (Calvary) hill, which is outside of the city walls of Jerusalem to die publicly & painfully to send a message of their power…

While this event may perhaps be a somewhat arguable “fact”, it’s enthusiastically supported around the world by today's Christian believers for His (apparent) Resurrection on our annual Easter Sunday… Their annual celebration of His birth perhaps 30 years earlier on our Christmas Day is also a part of today's King James' Bible where the event is actively reported in the Biblical Chapters of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John, each slightly different.

Biblical history is unavoidably odd… it’s surrounded by 450 earlier English translations, most of which (IMHO) were actually created by handfuls of priests who, in candle-lit basements selected certain scrolls from the hundreds of ancient scrolls, ignoring others such as The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, a critical untold story!!

Moving away from religion again, back to my ancestral data, the most remarkable discovery in my family tree research was that William I (born in October, 1024 in Beauclerc, northern France) was a direct ancestral link, my 27th Great-Grandfather! ( note 17 )

He was the Duke of Normandy, and later became the 1st Norman King of England by his sword & his large army in the Battle of Hastings… The battle was fought on Senlac Hill, just seven miles NW of Hastings, Sussex in England on a Saturday, October 14th, in 1066. The last Anglo-Saxon King, Harold II of England was killed by Williams' Norman forces at the end of the bloody, all-day battle, shot in the eye with an arrow, according to legend; his forces were also destroyed. There's actual genetic history here, making me (theoretically) a battle-capable warrior!

While some of my direct ancestors lived in England during both the artistic English Renaissance from the late 15th century & before the working man's Industrial Revolution that began 200+ years before my birth, they were farmers in Dorset, 150 miles south of Birmingham… that city became the 3rd largest in the country at that time. None of them were apparently inventors, nor were they apparently famous…

A more famous fellow is James Clerk Maxwell (who sadly has not yet been ascertained as a direct ancestor) was the Scottish scientist that discovered electromagnetic radiation in 1862 ( note 18 ), the theory that brought together electricity, magnetism & light as manifestations of the same phenomenon… an interesting coincidence is that this came to light just 100 years before my 1962 birthday!

Another extremely interesting Norwegian chap (also sadly not an ancestor & amazingly un-famous!) Victor Moritz Goldschmidt was the mineralogist in the early 1900’s who became the founder of modern geochemistry & crystal chemistry. He was also the developer of the invaluable Classification of Elements, which provides the basis for modern research on the geochemical distribution of the elements, and his subsequent compilation of data on cosmic abundances was the key to later theories on element synthesis in stars & supernovae. His work drives almost every aspect of today’s technical, mechanical & industrial world.

These two (and many others scientists, both famous & less-so) brought us the era of modern physics, laying the foundation for such delights as Einstein's special relativity theory and Dirac & Schrödinger’s view of quantum mechanics, each of which are essential in today's world of computing & coding, as well as all those trains/boats/planes/cars & our bicycles that are described above.

Considering the many things I've captured so far, "time" is the single thing ( note 19a ) that flows from the past to today in my story. Two contrasting viewpoints on time share that (1) time is "a part of the fundamental structure of the universe" (my "tick-tock" clocks) and (2) that time (space-time, perhaps?) differs in that "time is neither an event nor a thing, and is thus not itself measurable, nor can it be traveled".

Temporal measurement has preoccupied scientists & technologists since centuries past, making it the prime motivator of navigation, astronomy & the like. Periodic events & any periodic motions serve as standards for units of time; examples include the motion of the Sun across the sky (from East to West, anywhere on the Earth aside from being near to the poles), the phases of our Moon (which were used by the Babylonians to create our 7-day week--scroll down to "Ivar Kristvik"), the swing of a pendulum, the beat of a heart, etc.

Today's computers are continually shrinking and are presently at the physical limit of using Picoseconds
(1 trillionth of a second) in their processing. Today's international standard unit of our time is that 1 second is defined by measuring the electronic transition frequency of cesium atoms, pretty precisely!

Around 46 BC, Julius Ceaser directed Sosigenes of Alexandria to devise a better calendar than the seasonal tool that they were using at that time. A measurement of daily time was made back then by the use of a "clepsydra" (a water clock, 1st noted to have been in use a thousand years earlier, when the priests at Karnak were determining hours with these) and the use of a Greek sundial, providing time measures that led to our hours & then to our minutes in the early middle ages, actually 1st recorded in 1267.

Julius Ceaser restructured the new Roman calendar a couple years later to better cover each annual cycle that we make around the Sun (once thought to be the Sun moving around the Earth, considered the central point of everything!) from 10 months to 12 months. The 1st month was also changed at that time from March to January, and the 2nd month became February. July & August were also moved out to the 7th & 8th months and were renamed as July (which had been named "Quintilis", Latin for fifth) after Julius Ceaser in his honor, and August (named at that time as "Sextillia", sixth) was named after Augustus Ceaser 35 years later… The remaining months (September thru December) still have names that reflect derivations of their Romanic index, September from "septem" (seven), October from "octo" (eight), etc, etc.

As an interesting aside, Julian dates (used in computer programming) differ totally: a Julian date is the number of elapsed days since the beginning of a fixed cycle, invented in 1583, designed to simplify computing a difference between two calendar dates.

Today's Gregorian calendar was amended by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 to correct for the inadvertent Leap Year error. An extra day had been inserted in the Julian calendar at the end of February every 4th year to correct for a year of 365.25 days, but because the Romans couldn't measure time with sufficient precision (today, a year takes 365.242 days, which will certainly change in the future), a Julian year was discovered to be too long at that time by 11 minutes and 14 seconds.

To close, I've experienced some agonizing & extremely bad days during my 6+decades, yet I can share that…
   my parents & grandparents (all sadly RIP) happily helped to start up my life;
   my extensive learning from a dozen years of schooling, several in the British Army & 30+ years of working;
   my now 24+ year-old brain tumor remains good;
   my brothers & my many friends (past, present & RIP) around the world all bring me great memories;
   my invaluable sons, one happily married and one sadly lost;
   and, my beloved wife & her family -- her 2 children & spouses have these 4 grandkids
      I was also renamed "Grampy Don" in November 2014 by a grandson… *such* a delight!!

*EACH* of these things have brought me to where I am today, an aging & quite contented grandfather,
   living happily in the Southern United States!

One final note for the end of Ms. Gigi's long, long family branch of my tree: I've caught & tracked a number of things about myself, along with some future threads as well as my Bio page… Enjoy!

You can also visit my dynamic tree or my Ancestry tree, both of which hold virtual duplicates of my current local tree data…   Note: Ancestry requires you to sign in; eMail me if you need help?

Feel free to share your thoughts, comments or criticisms etc via eMail? Cheers!

Some relevant advisories: (1) my family tree data is All Rights Reserved © April/1988 – date Don Shave, and (2) as legal issues can surround such things as my published advice & opinions, my Privacy Policy & Disclaimers page is a mandatory addition… please review?

Created in Sep-2019 & last updated in Oct-2021
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