YOU ARE A SHARK

Consider this: If I took a picture of myself, and then placed a picture of my Dad, Ray Wiggins, on top of it.  Then found a picture of Grandad, Archibald Wiggins, and placed it on top of that before placing his father, James William (Bill) Wiggins, on top of those, and if I did the same with his father, Robert Penning-Wiggins, my great-great-grandfather, a builder, and the last person I have a photograph of, Robert’s father, William Wiggins, who I can only picture as a sort of shadowy figure, although I know he was a plasterer, on top of these, and if I just carried on piling the pictures on top of each other, going back through more and more and more great-great-greats, I could keep on doing this even before photography was invented. After all, how many ‘greats’ would I need for a decent experiment?

Well, I don’t expect anyone to be able to answer that because I haven’t yet said what the experiment is yet. But let’s pick a number out of mid-air, say, a mere 185 million or so will do nicely.

Mere? 

It isn’t easy to imagine a pile of 185 million pictures. How high would it be? Well, if each picture was printed as a normal picture postcard, 185 million pictures would form a tower about 220,000 feet high: that’s more than 180 skyscrapers standing on top of each other. Too tall to climb, even if it didn’t fall over (which it would). So, let’s tip it safely on its side, and pack the pictures along the length of a single bookshelf. How long is the bookshelf? About forty miles. The near end of the bookshelf has the picture of me. The far end has a picture of my 185 million great-grandfather. 

What did he look like? An old man with wispy hair and white side whiskers? A caveman in a dinosaur skin? Forget it. We don’t know exactly what he looked like, but fossils give the scientific community a pretty good idea. Believe it or not, my 185 million great-grandfather was ….. a fish. 

So was my 185 million great-grandmother, which is just as well or they couldn’t have mated with each other, and I wouldn’t be here at all. 

So, when people say we descended from the apes, we have to ask who the apes are descended from. 

Let’s now walk along our forty-mile bookshelf, pulling pictures off it one by one to have a look at them. Every picture shows a creature belonging to the same species as the picture on either side of it. Everyone looks just like its neighbours in the line, or at least as much alike as any man looks like his father and his son.

Yet if we walk steadily from one end of the bookshelf to the other, we’ll see a human at one end and a fish at the other. And lots of other interesting great-great-grandparents in-between, which include some animals that look like apes, others that look like monkeys and so on. Each one is like its neighbours in the line, yet if we pick any two pictures far apart in the line, they are very different, and if we follow the line from humans back far enough, we come to a fish. And from there, if we turned around to go forwards in time, it’s what happened when our fish ancestor had a fishy child, who had a fishy child, who had a fishy child ..… who, 185 million (gradually less fishy) generations later, turned out to be me.

So it was all very gradual – so gradual that I wouldn’t notice any change as I walked back a thousand years, or even ten thousand years, which would bring me to somewhere around my 400th great-grandfather. Or rather, I’d notice lots of little changes all the way along, because nobody looks exactly like their father, but I wouldn’t notice any general trend. Ten thousand years back from modern humans is not long enough to show a trend. 

A portrait of our ancestors of ten thousand years ago would be no different from modern people, if we set aside superficial differences in dress and hair and whisker style. He would be no more different from us than modern people are different from other modern people. How about a hundred thousand years, where we might find our 4000th great-grandfather? Well, now, maybe there would be a just noticeable change. Perhaps a slight thickening of the skull, especially under the eyebrows. But it would still only be slight. 

Now let’s push a bit further back in time. If I walked the first million years along the shelf, the picture of my 50,000th great-grandfather would be different enough to count as a different species, the one they call Homo erectus. We today, as you know, are Homo sapiens. Homo erectus and Homo sapiens probably wouldn’t have wanted to mate with each other, or, even if they did, the baby would probably not have been able to have babies of its own. 

We’re Homo sapiens and our 50,000th great-grandfather was Homo erectus. But there never was a Homo erectus who suddenly gave birth to a Homo sapiens baby. So, when we ask, ‘Who was the first person in my family tree, and when did they live?’ there’s no precise answer. It’s all kind of fuzzy. 

At some point, probably less than a million years ago but more than a hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors were sufficiently different from us that a modern person wouldn’t have been able to breed with them even if they had met.

But as a starting point for my family tree, I’ve opted to embark upon our journey with my 54th great-grandfather, Bældæg, son of the god Odin. Why? Well, to go back further, say, to my 185 million great-grandfather would, no doubt, make an interesting read, but the research would prove rather taxing. No records were kept of that particular fish, or what happened to his offspring, or where in the world he lived. Not even oral tradition survived from one generation to another.

So I’d be kind of stumped as to where to start.

And then, who was that fish’s dad? Who or what were his ancestors? Well, we’re probably looking at sharks because they evolved about 450 million years ago, which means they were around at least 90 million years before trees and 190 million years before the dinosaur. And during that time, they survived four of five global mass extinctions. 

Respect! 

Scientists seem to agree that sharks descended from small leaf-shaped fish that had no eyes, fins or bones, and these themselves evolved from some kind of single celled organisms, which would have been something like my 500 million great-grandfather.

Let’s face it, we’re all cousins. My family tree includes not just the obvious cousins like gorillas, apes and other primates, but also rodents, bison, lizards, kangaroos, snails, red kites, octopi, dandelions, mushrooms and bacteria (and possibly even viruses too). All are our cousins. Every last one of them. And the most wonderful thing of all is that we know for certain it is literally true. It’s a fact, beyond all doubt, that we share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet.

In England, our most recent shared ancestor probably lived only a few centuries back. In America, we might have to go back tens of thousands of years. But it’s England and the fascinating subject of shared ancestors we’re mostly concerned with here.

Apologies to anyone who still believes in the Garden of Eve and a talking snake, but that story is initially attributed to Moses - following the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt - between the 15th and 13th centuries BC. Most modern scholars accept that Genesis is a redacted literary work, reaching its final version as late as 400 BC, roughly 4.5 billion years after the earth was created.

Copyright © Karl Wiggins