You. The one with the list. The one who has decided that a man who pronounces a word funny, or owns the wrong kind of dog, or texts back in under four minutes, or texts back in over four minutes, is showing you who he is. The one who has built an entire epistemology around the green flag and the red flag and the beige flag and whatever color of flag was invented this week.
I want to talk to you about your ancestors.
The genus Homo has existed for one hundred thousand generations. Homo sapiens accounts for the last ten thousand. The other ninety thousand belong to twelve or so species we are no longer on speaking terms with, mostly because we interbred with them.
Here is what the genome confirms.
If you are not exclusively of recent sub-Saharan African descent, between one and four percent of you is Neanderthal. If your ancestry runs through Oceania, up to six percent of you is Denisovan.
The Ayta Magbukon of Luzon carry the highest documented Denisovan ancestry of any living people, which means at some point a sapiens grandmother somewhere in Island Southeast Asia looked at a Denisovan — different species, different skull, different chromosome structure, would not have passed your vibe check by any conceivable margin, we are talking different face shape — and decided they would.
Several sub-Saharan African populations carry DNA from a hominin species we have never identified and have no fossils for. We know it existed only because it is inside living people. There is a ghost in the genome and we do not have its name. Your great-great-great-grandmother some unfathomable number of greats back encountered a creature science cannot identify, and she did not concern herself with species.
In a Siberian cave in 2018, researchers sequenced a bone fragment from a thirteen-year-old girl who turned out to be the first-generation child of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. Two different species. One kid. The mother did not wear Prada. The father probably did not have insurance. They had a daughter and we have her bone.
Homo floresiensis, the three-foot-tall hobbits of Flores, vanish from the fossil record at exactly the moment Homo sapiens arrives in the region. Same story for Homo luzonensis in the Philippines. Same story for the Neanderthals. Same story for the Denisovans. In every case where we have the genetic data, the data shows admixture. The hobbits did not have great communication skills. They were three feet tall and possibly could not speak in any sense you would recognize. We hooked up with them anyway.
The Neanderthals, meanwhile, lived in small isolated valleys and married their cousins. The Altai individual was the product of incest going back generations. They had standards. They had a type. They knew what they liked and they kept it in the family.
They went extinct.
Sapiens walked further, exchanged mates across longer distances, maintained larger breeding networks, and showed up to every gathering they could find. When the two populations met, gene flow ran predominantly into sapiens, because Homo sapiens was where the parties were.
The Neanderthals went extinct because they would not leave the valley.
So here is the actual, peer-reviewed, sequenced and published origin story of every human being currently reading this:
You are the great-great-great-hundred-thousand-times-great-grandchild of a long unbroken chain of forebears who, upon encountering a creature that was demonstrably a different species, did not say I’m getting a weird vibe. They did not say that’s a red flag for me. They did not say I just don’t see it going anywhere. They reproduced. Every single one of them. The branch of the family that flinched is not in the gene pool. They left no descendants. They are gone.
You are descended exclusively from the people who said yes across gaps so wide that the offspring were technically a different taxonomic category than at least one of the parents.
And you are out here ruling out a guy because he uses the wrong emoji.
A hundred thousand generations of your ancestors are watching this and weeping. Your DNA was built by absolute sluts of the Pleistocene. Women who saw a Neanderthal and thought sure. Men who encountered a Denisovan in a mountain pass and did not require three dates first. Whole populations whose entire survival strategy was a willingness to show up.
That is the lineage. That is the data. That is who you came from.
Where my peoples come from, we showed up. Different valley, different cave, different skull shape, different species — we showed up. That’s the whole reason there’s a we.
You are descended from the yes.
So quit pretending you have standards.
