Waking the Dead

Totally loving the book I'm reading at the moment, and can't recommend it highly enough.

Ian Wilson's "Past Lives"

It's on my absolutely all-time favourite subject; DNA testing skeletons from the past, which to me is the most fascinating thing ever, but here they also look for descendants, which is beyond-my-wildest-dreams fascinating.

But mostly it's about rebuilding the facial features on ancient skulls and comparing their faces with those self-same descendants ... and gosh, you can really see the connection. Like, there's a chapter on The Chedder Man. Remember him? That news story from several years ago? How they found this 10,000 skeleton in Chedder Caves and wanted to know if he had descendants and so were testing locals? And how the teacher who brought the kids along to be DNA-tested turned out to be a direct descendant? Remember that story?

Anyway, in one of the case-studies in this book, they reconstruct the face of Chedder Man and they compare it with the face of Adrian Taggart - that teacher - and lo and behold, it's practically the same person ... although, naturally, Mr Taggart doesn't have that massive abscess on his forehead that killed Chedder Man.

It's astonishingly comforting to me to know that an ancestor 10,000 years ago still looks like a member of your own immediate family. I love all that stuff. And I really like that little bits of faces of, like, 16th cousins resemble your own or a family members'. And I love stuff like meeting someone from, say, Wexford in Ireland, and saying "Hey, you look like my sister!" or someone with the same surname as in our family and "Wow, you have my mum's eyes!" or, say, that portrait of the explorer Johan Burkhart ...

 ... who discovered Petra - my paternal grandmother was a Burkhart - and being totally amazed because, from the nose up, "That's my dad!".

Or meeting that guy in Outback Australia, Mr Benjamen, and recognising him immediately as someone I'd seen before in Banuve Village in Sigatoka, in Fiji, and telling him so, which he totally denied - "No, I'm definitely Aboriginal! Never been near Fiji!" - but which, turns out, made him stop and think - "How come I don't know what Aboriginal Tribe I'm from?" which sent him spiraling down into depression and an enormous identity crisis that lead to a seven year search for His Roots which passed through the discovery that "I'm a Kanaka!" (descendant of the Sugar Slaves - South Sea Islanders kidnapped and brought to North Queensland to work in the sugar fields) and ended up, after a very exhaustive search, in Fiji, where, within a day and after asking only two questions of locals - "What is my clan name?" and "Where is our land?" - took him straight to ... dah, dah ... Banuve Village on the banks of the Sigatoka River!

Fascinating, huh! It would have been well over a century since some ancestral Banuve Villager was kidnapped by Blackbirders, but nonetheless Mr B. was still identical in looks to a family member descended from someone NOT kidnapped as a Sugar Slave ...

... oh, and the most amazing thing is that, when he finally got to Fiji, people kept waving to him like they knew him, and when he went up to one of the wavers - the one who was the spitting image of his uncle - and asked him who everyone thought he was, he was told a name and "He's the Legal Advocate down at the Courthouse!" and just GUESS what Mr B. did for a living? Yup, he was the Legal Advocate for Aboriginals going through the courts in the Outback! Like he said when he was telling me this story "It's like that film "Sliding Doors" only not quite."

And when I asked him "Will you return to live in Fiji?", he said "My family will have to decide what they want to do, but for me there's hardly any point. I'm already there!"

And he also said the moment he was given his clan name (actually it was his "matagali name", the name of his extended family) his deep depression instantly lifted ... and, immediately after the overwhelming feeling of relief, he felt a strong urge to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken. Go figure!

Oooh, yes, and three other things about Mr B.!

1) His handwriting looked absolutely Pacific Islander - as did his son James' who I used to teach - and they always have very distinctive handwriting, which I had no idea could be genetic.

2) Mr B. and James were both rugby players and rugby crazy (James now plays for the Queensland Broncos). And, what do you know, Naronga, the province where Banuave Village is located, is where all Fiji's best and most rugby-crazy players always come from.

3) Mr B. always spoke in very well balanced albeit paradoxical sentences which is Fijian-to-the-Max. Like, when I told him he should have just skipped the 7 year search and gone straight to Banuve Village to check it out, he replied "Denise, you are right but you are also wrong!" which is the most Fijian-esque phrase imaginable because they are true masters of the complex double-think! Who'd have guessed that was genetic as well.

And, you know, thinking about it, that whole incident is so very strange and synchronous, it seems like it smacks of Hand of God! Like, how could something so trivial as taking a wrong turn in a jungle end up being so desperately, desperately important a decade later in the life of someone else. Like, if we hadn't accidentally driven on the wrong road, and ended up on a village green instead of a surf beach, we wouldn't have had that man come out of his bure to scold us - "Would you mind backing out instead of turning your car around. We are playing rugby on that field tomorrow and we don't want your wheels messing it up." - and then I wouldn't have recognised Mr Benjamen as the spitting image of "Scolding Man", and he would still be thinking of himself as "Australian Aboriginal"! Hand of God! Yes?

But anyway, great book! Do read it!