Harish Palaniappan's

A sudden thought.. and I was wondering where all these human beings I come across came from. It started after I saw the usual thing that irritates me while I am driving.. seeing somebody spit on the road with all the ignorance they can show to keeping the city/place clean.

After cribbing to myself over it for few minutes, I landed up thinking about evolution of human beings. Yea, I know I am wasting lot of time thinking over a lot of things.. too much of the time.. but for now, this thought I think is worth sharing.

Born in Africa:
Most of us know or have read somewhere that the human species emerged from Africa. Many findings and researches on the species and evolution of life on earth, have only confirmed this, times too many.

Some interesting questions come up.. which we probably don't seem to ponder over much:

Does Africa look like the cradle of the earth..
Has mankind(including women) done "anything" interesting to the birthplace of us all.

Some of us take extraordinary measures to keep the birth place of our gods and goddesses, or the birthplace of our religious beliefs in great shape and with all sacred-ness attached.

What have human done with Africa.

SouthAfrica is a great place.. that's fine.
But what we see in at least the rest of africa is not like anything respected as the birthplace of human species.. it only looks the other way.. like the butchering place of human species.. take Darfur.. take Rwanda..

Is it then always like.. migration takes off the love you have for your starting point? I haven't migrated much, so I don't know.. but looks like migrations not only take off love, it just detaches you from the original world. Its like we shifted from Earth to Mars, and ignored about back home, because we consider it somebody else's place.

Migration does a lot to people.. thanks to that fairer skin some of us have, only because our species moved to colder parts of earth. But this shift in migration has changed a lot more, a lot in how people live, and how they see different parts of the Earth.

To the American president, America is the world.. and the other part.. is called the "Rest of the world". I think most American president's have famously used the 'Rest of the world' thing in all their speeches.. at least their election campaign speeches.

The Genographic project:
Not geo-graphic.. but geno-graphic.
The national geographic channel.. has this project.. studying the migration of human species from genes... genes that are voluntarily donated from people around the world.

Anybody(human.. :o) is welcome to donate.. if you want to, you can sign-up on their website, buy a gene kit, which you will use to extract a small sample of blood from your body and send it with your details, your immediate parent details, and your place of stay or migration history from however high the family chain you can remember.. if you wish to, you can send your details anonymously without your name or exact street address and all.

They will take a few months.. and send you back a gene map of your evolution(by email only).. with details particularly stating how you came to where you are... from Africa.. of course, they have their disclaimers of the accuracy of the map because it is simply based on the number of donor samples they receive from around the globe. Also, they add your gene mapping to the world's gene mapping they are creating.

Off track:
For now.. I think I remembered the song 'Born in Africa' by Dr.Alban.. one of my favorites years back. These days, probably Dr.Alban is too old for the music industry and he doesn't seem to release anything.. My other favorite of Alban's was.. "It's my life".