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Recently I went to a friend’s 70th birthday party. Another friend and I were the only ones there from his early childhood, before he moved away, at age 12, from our hometown on Long Island. We reconnected years later and have seen each other occasionally since then. Despite not having regular contact, it meant a lot to him for us to be there. It meant a lot to us, too. Staying connected to old friends, I thought, connects us to our distant pasts, and it becomes more precious as we get older. It also provides a sense of continuity, identity and rootedness. This may be why genealogy and family history can be so powerful.
It is also why Mal Slavin’s book is profound. It connects us in a very deep way to our early human (and pre-human) history. By around 300,000 years ago in Africa, Slavin explains, we emerged from other species “who had been adapted to the universe in basically the same way as were all other nonhuman animals: namely, through an evolved inner system built on a huge amount of cohesively organized, innate, instinctual (and innately unfolding) knowledge of and responsiveness to the world” (p. 19).
Slavin shows us that certain essential human qualities evolved by natural selection to enable us to adapt to the fact that, in our transition from primates to humans, we lost our embeddedness in nature, our reliance on pre-programmed, innate knowledge to develop, adapt, and survive. Slavin writes,
That loss, as well as the more familiar Sapiens adaptations that replaced it—human language, cognition, culture (Harari, 2014)—became an identity-shaping trade-off in which our basic human existential condition also emerged. The new mix of gain and loss brought an awareness of our own mortality as well as the often hidden otherness within both ourselves and all others with whom we relate. (p. 1)
Slavin begins The Story of Original Loss with his experience seeing the cave paintings of our early human ancestors. As a 19-year-old student, when Slavin first saw the 50,000-year