We presumed they were on their way out
by then, the cousins of our ancestors;
in our thoughts we had reduced their
genus to the fringes of the evolutionary
diorama by then, eating their tough
roots without a stone tool to be seen,
waiting for their last few hundred
thousand years to run out before
mineralizing into fossils. But now,
here we have capensis, late in the day,
resurrected into knowing from
a museum cabinet, no longer one
of our forefathers and foremothers,
but a sprig from that robust line
evolving towards something less
specialized, more like our ancestors
had been a million years earlier,
making it's way from a cul-de-sac
towards wide open evolutionary road
to future forms. It's like the nature
would have had second thoughts
about our father and mother Homo
erectus, seen something of what
we would become, and reached
for a Plan B. We won, we won
the crown, the thumb on
the trigger to bring a nuclear
Holocaust after all our other
holocausts, we won our shame
of the Sixth Mass Extinction,
the shame of all the extinct
brother and sister species
flickering out at our arrival
in the lands they inhabited,
and somewhere along the way
we perhaps cast a stone or,
if they lingered on the edges
of that diorama long enough,
a spear that killed the last
Paranthropus capensis
or some form born of it,
still hidden in rock
or a museum cabinet.
10.02.2025
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