Two different experiential scripts have been assembled, based on the 2004 science book by Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale. Dawkins characterizes his book as "an epic pilgrimage from the present to the past", and he suggests that in this journey "We shall be pilgrims, then, sharing fellowship ever more inclusively with other pilgrim bands, which also have been swelling on their own way to their rendezvous with us."
1-minute VIDEO PREVIEW of the book by the author, Richard Dawkins.
Amazingly, it takes only it takes ONLY 40 such rendezvous for humans to meet chimpanzees, other apes, monkeys, other primates, other placental mammals, and so on back through the entire journey of life. Both versions of the group experience below (available in pdf format) have this 40-part structure, but can easily be adapted for groups from 20 to 100.
&diams 1. "The River of Life: An Evolutionary Journey" - This is the easiest and most kid-friendly of the versions. Imagine every species of life alive on Earth today designating a single ambassador to journey back through time, following their evolutionary lineages. Group by group, the lineages of the ambassadors begin to merge, as they come upon shared ancestors. We can take this journey together by beginning as the human ambassador, who encounters other lineages merging on the same journey back in time. We can picture this journey as drops of water flowing down a watershed, becoming rivulets, then streams, then bigger and bigger tributaries, as they all eventually come together in The River of Life. A River of Life SONG can be accessed (and listened to) for use during or at the end of the process or on its own in the classroom. During the experience, transiting from station to station, you might want to use a simple "River of Life Chant". NOTE: Connie Barlow has developed a 1.5-hour participatory powerpoint program on "The River of Life", which can be extended into a multi-day program if it is combined with the scripts used in "The River of Life" experience. Connie is happy to present this program to upper elementary or middle school students, if she is in your area (click on itinerary). Or, she would be happy to have the entire (richly illustrated) program uploaded to someone's website so that teachers could download it for their own use.
Imagine every species of life alive on Earth today designating a single ambassador to journey back through time to the very origin of life 3.8 billion years ago. Group by group, the ambassadors meet up with one another — first those most closely related, and then the more distantly related. Amazingly, we humans encounter such groups of ambassadors only 40 times during the whole 3.8 billion years of time travel. That's because all the plants have already joined with one another before their stream of travellers merges with ours, and so forth. If we picture this journey back through time as drops of water flowing down a watershed, becoming rivulets, then streams, then bigger and bigger tributaries, we begin to feel that we are all travelling on this "River of Life", heading back to our shared "Ocean of Origin."
2. "Greet the Concestors" - In this version, the focus shifts from our fellow ambassadors (species alive today) to what the shared ancestor ("concestor") looked like whenever we merge with another stream of pilgrims taking their own journey back through time. We also focus on what body parts our lineage of life gains or loses at each of the 40 "rendezvous points."
3. "Ancestors Meditation" - This reading (created to accompany a Samhain autumn ritual) by Jon Cleland-Host, is not derived from the science in Richard Dawkins' book. It is a much faster way to survey the flow of ancestral life forms and situations without focussing on the 40 points of confluence.
4. "River of Life BEADS" - A fabulous supplement to this experience, especially in a school setting, is to use the 40 confluence points as the basis for making GREAT STORY BEADS.
The 40 Concestors: (1) chimpanzees; (2) gorilla; (3) orang utan; (4) gibbons; (5) Old World monkeys; (6) New World monkeys; (7) tarsiers; (8) lemurs; (9) tree shrews; (10) rodents & rabbits; (11) Laurasiathere mammals; (12) Xenarthran mammals; (13) Afrothere mammals; (14) Marsupial mammals; (15) Monotreme mammals; (16) reptiles & birds; (17) amphibian; (18) lungfish; (19) coelacanth; (20) ray-finned fishes; (21) sharks; (22) lampreys & hagfish; (23) lancelets; (24) sea squirts; (25) starfish; (26) mollusks, worms, crustaceans, insects & spiders; (27) primitive flatworms; (28) jellyfish; (29) comb jellies; (30) placozoans; (31) sponges; (32) single-cell eukaryotes; (33) drips; (34) fungus; (35) amoebozoan; (36) plants & algae; (37) Giardia, diatoms, forams, & brown algae; (38) Archaea; (39) Eubacteria; (40) Origin of Life
