January 30, 2023 – Calgary Airport
The flight we are on today is a homeward-bound journey. It will take about 20 hours to fly from Calgary to Johannesburg, a relatively brief journey when you consider that the outbound leg of the trip took 200,000 years.
Human life began in southern Africa. A complex evolutionary chain of events resulted in primates diverging from other mammals approximately 85 million years ago. 65 million years of evolution later, the first Hominids (great apes) made an appearance.
Anatomically modern humans emerged in southern Africa approximately 300,000 years ago.
As technology, weaponry, and language advanced, homo sapiens began drifting northward off the African continent, starting about 200,000 years ago. In the millennia that followed, humankind wandered to every continent, eventually populating the entire planet.
The British Isles and Scandinavia were covered in ice until about 12,000 years ago, so my ancestors were relative latecomers in the human migration process.
115 years ago, a blip in evolutionary terms, my ancestors emigrated to Canada from Scotland, England, and Denmark.
Today, we are going home.
Home to Africa
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