Saturday, June 18, 2011

The Greater Number 3: The Simian Connection part 5

  All day, Darion was seeing little shadows all over the place.  He also saw figures that were more humanoid in form, yet not quite human.  He took some time to fall asleep that night because he kept jumping at every shadow.  Eventually, when sleep did come, Shwama Po returned, just as Darion hoped he would.  He had some questions for the former king of Shangri La.
  "Mr. king, I've been wondering something," Darion came out with.
  "I am no longer king, you are.  With what have you been laden?"
  "Well, I've been seeing all kinds of shadows and shapes all day.  Is that just a part of the Shangri La experience?  The others don't seem to see what I see, so I guess not, but what's up?"
  "That is a part of the Guardian Heart experience.  You are now connected to the world of the wild.  The shadows you see are the spirits of members of your family."
  "My family?  My parents are both still alive.  Who are you talking about?"
  "Think on the larger scale.  Cro Magnon, Neanderthal, chimpanzee, Sasquatch, yeti."
  "Well I'll be a monkey's uncle.  I'm seeing cave man ghosts?  Bigfoot?  How come I never saw that stuff before?  What does this heart transplant have to do with this?"
  "Most humans do not see the spirits of the wild.  After childhood, most are pure enough of heart.  You have literally become more pure of heart with this transplant."
  "What do you mean pure?"
  "I mean in touch with the spirit world, like humans were before they gained intelligence.  As primates you were more pure of spirit and sensitive to the world of spirit and the divine, the unseen world. You've lost that because your minds took over in importance and messed up your priorities. You've lost touch with your hearts in favor of logic and reason.  This is not a judgment, but an observation."
  "Well, it sounds like a judgment to me!  You're saying that humans as a species are screwed up."
  "You do have much more in common with your simian counterparts than you may know.  After all, you were just like them before the second sixth day."
  "Yeah, I knew there'd be more to the story once you started talking about the first sixth day last night."
  "There's much more to the story than you know.  The second sixth day was when God gave intelligence to the Cro Magnon man.  A distant star had gone supernova and the effects on Earth were two-fold.  The first, as I said, was a rapid evolution of the human mind.  That is why a 'missing link' has never been found between the more primitive Neanderthals."
  "Whoa, so the first people, Adam and Eve, were cavemen?"
  "So to speak.  They did live in caves, but they weren't the first people in the way you may be thinking.  More accurately, they were the last."
  "You're floggin' my noggin!" exclaimed Darion.
  "I didn't mean to.  Is that a bad thing?  Anyway, as I said, the effects of the supernova were two-fold.  The second effect was that a disease that had affected the Neanderthals also mutated."
  "Disease?  What disease?" asked Darion.
  "Are you familiar with prions?"  Shwama Po answered Darion's question with a question of his own.
  "Uh yeah, like mad cow disease and stuff, right?"
  "There was an ice age coming and the Neanderthals had started to resort to cannibalism due to a lack of food sources.  This cannibalism led to a disease similar to Kuru.  Over in the eastern highlands of Papua, New Guinea, there was a tribe not too long ago who had a custom of showing respect for deceased family members by eating them.  This transmitted the disease from the organs and the flesh into the eaters."
  "Yeah, I heard about that.  So that's a prion disease?"
  "Yes.  Kuru means 'trembling with fear' in the language of the Fore people.  You see, trembling is a symptom of dying brain tissue.  Other symptoms include loss of balance, disrupted coordination, blindness and dementia.  The supernova caused the prion disease to mutate in such a way that the symptoms were more extreme and could be transmitted through bodily fluid. The victims became demented and bit others, spreading the disease at an alarming rate and wiping out the entire Neanderthal race quickly."
  "What's that got to do with Adam and Eve?"
  "I'm getting to that.  The Neanderthals were quickly wiping themselves out.  In a blind dementia-fueled rage, some of them even bit woolly mammoths.  Prion diseases, as you may know, generally do not transmit between species.  A bitten mammoth would become a nidus.  It could spread the disease, but not show any of the symptoms of it.  The newly intelligent Cro Magnon people were catching the disease by eating mammoth meat.  By the time they figured that out, there were not many left to carry on the species.  At the end there were only two who survived."
  "Adam and Eve," concluded Darion.
  "They had been living in Africa, but after that, they left to seek out new lands.  The ice age wiped out the rest of the Neanderthals.  Adam and Eve went on to propagate the human race as you know it now."

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