Going off a post I saw, what is a moment where you felt connected to your ancient ancestors? I'm not talking about like, a few thousand years ago, I'm talking like, the first ever humans kinda times. Hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa and Eurasia living alongside other human species.

My moment was when I was in the Dragoon mountains in the Chihuahuan desert. I was camping there for work in this little nook between the mountains and hills that was forested with oak trees. I stood on a nearby hill on the road to get some service.

The sun was setting and I could just see the constellations in the sky. In the west, I could see the sun, followed by the Pleiades, Taurus, and Orion all in a perfect line. I could see the constellation behind Orion but I couldn't remember what it was supposed to be and I couldn't really tell by looking at it. I realized the scene before me, the short shrubby mesquite trees, the low and odd-shaped hills, and the yellow grassland silhouetted against the sunset looked superficially, like Africa to me. I did a little thought experiment. I tried to pretend that I WAS in Africa. That everything I saw was some open savannah that I had found myself in. I couldn't see any detail in the dark, so it worked very well.

The feeling I got was... unease. I had camped in the wilderness many times, sometimes in the knowing territory of bears and mountain lions, but I always knew I was probably fine with the right precautions. But this was different. Beyond your usual post-horror movie panic of being afraid of dark corners. It was an oppressive and vague horror that was deeply humbling. This land I was pretending to see, unlike the one I was actually in, knew me. It has always known me and what I am and what I can do, and it knows exactly how to kill me. A mountain lion can see me as a threat, a danger, an inconvenience, of course. They've lived with Native Americans for a very long time. But the creatures of Africa? They saw my species born from the cosmic womb of time immemorial. This land was designed specifically to counter and compete with everything I was and will continue to do so for a long time. I was in some sense, no stranger to the African lion who had never seen a human.

I looked up to the constellation behind Orion and my brain filled in the blanks of what I did not know. I saw a lion jumping to kill Orion who had his back turned, too stubborn in his quest of conquering Taurus to notice.

western diamondback rattlesnake (Crotalus atrox) at San Pedro Riparian Conservation Area