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48 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW DE. STEWARD FROM My blood is from every person's blood before me. It is everybody who has ever been alive or is now alive and everything that has ever been which makes me. Of course genetically it is my specific ancestors who are responsible for me, and they are legion because I am the issue of my two parents each of whom had two parents themselves, each of whom had two parents, who each had two parents, each had parents, each two parents all the way to Olduvai. There are not an infinite number of pairings behind but there were a multitude. About thirty thousand generations of multiples of two since we have been sapient, and then millions more mammalian multiples of paired urhumans back behind Hadar, where the earliest homonid remains of all so far were found. Most of the record of all those myriad beings is lost and I am only rarely cognizant of them, although I know that in accumulation they were as important to making me as were my parents, the first and only possible two DNA coil carrying people who could produce me as I am. For each of us alive now there have been roughly thirty thousand pairs behind since we became human, but I reckon my direct development from about the one hundredth multiple, or three thousand years ago. Probably there were even more in total than I calculate because although figuring thirty years a generation is reasonable for recent times, much of my genetic past comes from times and tropic places where children must have come well before their parents died at twenty five or twenty seven, or at eighteen for that matter. And there are deadends in my genetic progression, all those people subsidiary to my ancestors who died unreproduced. Not even a moot point though because here I am, born with what I have, out of two people who were born each out of two people, each out of two people. It is absurd to speculate on what else I might have been. I am here alive. That is enough. All the lifemass of the past which put me here may be a function of accident and chance yet at the same time it is reasonable since my mind wanders on through time as long as its latitude is allowed. Transient in time, I know the age in which I live and my environment well enough to frequently attempt a reckoning, to want to take a bearing on myself to find out where what I am has been. One aspect of that past, my genetic heritage, the DNA entwined stamp of what I am, is something that I wish to celebrate. STEWARD 49 The beginnings of what we think of as civilization lie far behind the one hundred multiples, perhaps at about the two nundred and fiftieth pair. But it is incredible that even one hundred generations ago there were theoretically two to the one hundredth power people alive who carried my future in themselves. Yes, my blood is from every person's blood in the past because, perplexingly, 2100 people is a number greater than all the people who were on the earth three thousand years ago, a number even greater than the sumtotal of all humans who have ever lived. The discrepancy between the theoretical numbers and common sense mostly has to do with cousins marrying cousins, resulting in shared grandparents , so narrowing everyone's genetic fan dramatically. Interestingly, one definition of population explosion could be stated on the basis of so many people now not being confined by the genetic community into which they are born, so that with general exogamy we are closer to fulfillment of an infinity of ancestors, which by definition means a near infinity of people. But most of us alive now are still from a limited gene pool, or have in our heritage only a small cluster of gene pools. Even with this limitation, the ties and lines and conjunctions of our genetic past spread out fast and far and compel me to be aware that I am bound to every other human, everyone , everywhere, alltime. All...