For myself and anyone else who has ever contemplated time travel seriously there's a question that burns in the heart: not just where would you go, but when. If you had all of time at your grubby fingertips, if you could go anywhere and anywhen, what would the first stop be? This is as vital a question to armchair dreamers as figuring out what to do with that 50 million dollar lottery we're all bound to win someday.
My answer isn't a specific date. It's a bunch of dates and events that no one could possibly know the exact specifications of, since they happened thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years before written language was even a twinkle in homo sapiens sapiens eyes...
I want to be there the first time a human ancestor picks up a shell, drills a hole in it, and threads a piece of animal tendon or stretched skin through that hole, tying it off and wearing it around their neck.
I want to be there the first time an animal skin is dyed, and the first time a hominid's living skin is similarly painted.
I want to be there the first time an ape realizes that meat + fire = BBQ.
I want to be there when someone adds the earliest incarnation of garlic to their cooking and gets their MIND BLOWN.
I want to be there when some ancient humanoid beats the first deliberate rhythm, with their hands on their flesh, or with a stick on a rock, mimicking the inexorable heartbeat they must hear sometimes when they lay their head against the chest of their mothers, and later, their lovers, or when they hear their own heart beating in their ears as they try to sleep. Is it the footsteps of giants? Or the pulsing of the earth that they're replicating with their drumming?
I want, more than anything, to stand in a cave, and watch the first brushstrokes of the first cave painting. Did that ancestor of mine feel what I feel when I stand in front of a blank canvas? The crush of excitement and fear and a desperate drive to add color and life and movement to a surface that has been without those things? How many times was that wall approached, instrument in hand while this magnificent being struggled with doubt or anticipation? What glowing, burning thing lit their way?
Was their first stroke done in a fit of pique? Quickly, madly, desperately moving because not moving is no longer an option? Or slowly, cautiously, tentatively, with some hint of inborn knowledge that these marks would mean so much to so many for so long?
Did the finished product bring tears to that hominids' eyes? Like it brings tears to mine?
These are the whens and wheres that I would travel to. Because every time I wear a necklace, I think of the graves of early homo sapiens, littered with shells in graduated sizes, each drilled painstakingly and obviously connected together with a fabric that has long since been reclaimed by the earth around it.
Every time I wear a pretty dress, or put make-up on my face, I think of the ancient evidence we've dug up of dyes from every imaginable (and occasionally disgusting) source on this earth, and all the places we used those dyes, and I think of the obvious attraction we have as a species to color.
Every time I stir a pot of something over a flame, I think of a time when fire was a brand new technology, scarcely understood and terrifying, but how it was nevertheless used to create food that meant more than mere survival.
Every time I listen to music, I think of the long line of ancestors whose bodies must, must have been moved to dancing, and I twirl with my arms in the air pretending I'm under an ancient sky at the dawn of man.
Every time I paint, I cry for the homo sapiens who first knew how to see beauty in the world and add to it through the work of their own hands.
I cannot help but get caught in the idea of the moment that these things first happened. What were these creatures before art? Before rhythm and painting and decoration and cuisine? How did they react the first time? Because there was a first time. Somewhen in time, there is a day, with a sunrise and a sunset. The day before this day, there was no such thing as a drum. The day after, there was music!
And the reaction of the others in whatever homo species this occurred in must have been positive enough, or we wouldn't have music today. Or art, fashion, cuisine. The evidence of the value of these things exists in their longevity, from the dawn of man to today. These are, in fact, the markers by which anthropologists date that dawning.
And whenever I consciously participate in these things, I feel strings connecting me to those ancestors, pulling me backwards in time, but also forwards, since those strings also connect me to every human being that exists today, and that will exist in the future.
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