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| Ambiguity 1 LiDoña Wagner 2024 |
Grandmother Phenomenon
Standing in front of a glass exhibit case on the second floor of the Human Evolution Museum in Burgos, Spain in 2017, I was stunned to learn for the first time about the Grandmother Phenomenon in humanity’s evolution.
When our hunter gatherer ancestors migrated from Africa into the Near East and Northern Mediterranean regions, women began in earnest to collect and propagate plants as a source of nutrition. Alleviating hunger ‘in place’ meant that Homo Sapiens did not have to keep moving in search of food. Permanent and semi-permanent settlements began to form. As women took on agriculture, men became herders more than hunters.
Caregiving replaced the predatory behaviors they had learned from other animals. Young girls and child-bearing women were out in fields and forests for long hours. They left newborns with their own less physically strong mothers (grandmothers) to care for and educate. The human lifespan at that time was thirty to forty years, so grandmothers were the equivalent of sixty to seventy years today.
Ambiguity 2 LiDoña Wagner 2024
Fireside Storytellers
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| Ambiguity 2 LiDoña Wagner 2024 |
Before and after this transition to living in place, as a tribe ate and rested around a communal fire in the evening, their oldest members told stories about where they had come from and the strength and courage it had taken to reach new-found security.
In contemporary society this key social role of storytelling has been taken over by profit-oriented media. Throughout my lifetime, media have hyped youth and diminished the historical role elders play in an ever-evolving humanity. One result has been Ageism, the denigration and dismissal of older people as irrelevant and a burden on society.
Ambiguity 3 LiDoña Wagner 2024
Grandfather Phenomenon
In recent weeks, the United States has been confronting Ageism head on by reminding us that wisdom is neither book learning nor is it following the latest fad or most entertaining clown. Wisdom is experience reflected upon and distilled into nuggets and decisions that can enable humanity to continue to evolve in response to new threats and dangers.
On Sunday, July 21, we witnessed the Grandfather Phenomenon as President Joe Biden passed the torch of leadership to a younger person of character and integrity, the experienced Black woman who has been his steadfast partner in meeting the demands of our times. In acknowledging that there is a time and place for fresh ideas, he revived the storytelling role of elders around the world.
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| Ambiguity LiDoña Wagner 2024 |
3 comments:
Hi LiDona, I love your Ambiguity series! Thanks for all the wisdom and creativity you've shared! Big hugs! Melody
Thank you, LiDona! Right on! Your earlier e-mail put me into a series called Presbyterians for Earth Care, which was quite fascinating, sharing a futuric role for our faith communities, beyond "beliefs" and "policy" etc. and was a way of Passing the Torch. However, I recalled that you had two or three emails, so I returned to them for the real LiDona posting. Yes, we all torches to relinquish as we build the new future. Thank you, Grandfather Joe. Lynda
As usual, you illumine the now by use of the past. (Ambiguity 4 is my fave right now.)
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