Fast Forward and Rewind

Living on the edge of the Cradle of Humankind, I’m constantly reminded of the fragility of our existence. In a cave, not 20 km from where I sit, Ms. Ples met her demise, presumably having fallen to her death, not surprisingly, in an area famous for its dolomite sinkholes.

Is it possible that she walked upon the same soil that I do? Extremely! Although it might have turned a few times since she was around.

I can’t help but wonder what life was like when Ms. Ples ventured the earth. No metropolises, no threat of a financial melt-down, no concerns about what to wear, which procedure I should go for next, is my child in the right school, where should we go on our next vacation, how can I prove I’m better than the rest of the 1 407 applicants who applied for the position I’ve set my heart on?

Do you suppose she was concerned about positive thinking? Perhaps that’s what she was doing – walking along, staring at the stars in the bright (no pollution in those days) night sky, contemplating the universe and her connection to it when, oops… the bottom fell out of her world!

A more likely scenario could have been that she was running like the wind to evade some ravenous, noisy predator or, pursuing dinner for the family. But, who will have missed her? Was there someone with her when she fell, did they try to help her out of her quandary, or were there many who, once they witnessed an unsafe area that swallowed one of their kind, simply decided they weren’t ready for the challenge and evaded the hole themselves?

As we stand on the brink of human morphology ourselves, we have to be able to relate to Ms. Ples, the acclaimed link between rural and urban existence, and with so much to consider in history and science, we should ask ourselves every kind of question; perhaps there really were spacemen who landed on earth – perhaps one got stranded and a little lonely and found grandma Ples and … as they say, history repeats itself and nothing is more powerful than passion.

Back to Ms. Ples; presuming she had a husband, she will have shared him with a number of other wives who will, of course, not have missed her at all, but will he have looked for her, did she have children, did anybody care?

Of course they do now, I do, I feel compelled to! – I can’t believe that I, of all people, with all the things I have to worry about, now also have the burden of concerning myself over the welfare of a 2.1-million-year-old Australopithecus skull!

Help me please!