LUCAsian After Math

Once upon a time, long after Dinosauria roamed Pangaea, in Cenozoic-Pleistocene-Gelasian times, before an era of fictional dragons, rocs, orcs, dwarves, wizards, elves & hobbits, genus Australopithecus spawned Homo in Gaîa. 

A mere blip on the world stage, tree-living biped foragers went virtually unnoticed, as their brains gradually grew in size & complexity, while other species exceeded them in speed, strength, sight, smell, hearing, tunnelling & flight. 

By powers of observation, adaptation & ingenuity, they got Acheulean tools, arts, fire & useful animals under their control. Not much remains of ancient Homo: cave art, fire pits, bones, teeth, but no prehuman "missing link". 

Homo ergaster 'workman' LUCA was born in what a million years later would be Africa's Āssab Eritrea. Scant body hair, long legs, big nose, flat face, small jaw & teeth were normal for his kind. A toolmaker with itchy feet & a yen to explore, as a boy he built bamboo boats & dreamt of sailing abroad.

Sea levels were hundreds of feet lower at that time with an extensive ice cap shrouding the northern hemisphere, up to 12,000 feet thick in areas, until melting fairly recently nearly all evidence of shore dwellers lost when waters rose.

6 feet tall 150 pounds during his apex predator meat-eater rite of passage, used to a diet of seafood with squid, turtle, cuttlefish & lobster often on his menus, he kept flint knives, spear tips & hand axes, as well as fire-makers & sturdy skiffs for trips across the strait in calm weather. When he chose to travel eastward, 11 members of the tribe joined him on a rafting voyage overseas. 

Unlike calm water rafts, ocean-going craft must withstand constant wave-pounding. LUCA built his with sturdy fresh bamboo bound in bundles by hemp/flax & beeswax twine. For the seemingly endless Ice Age, it was unseasonably hot that year, a time to frolic amidst misty sea breezes. 

Counting by twos or tens or twelves or twenties or sixties & hugging the far coastline let them put ashore on stormy days to explore & hunt in new turf. He named it Alithʻala (Arabia). Danger lurked daily so weapons were ever near. Snakelike frilled sharks, pygmy right whales, chambered nautiluses & large coelocanths patrolled these waters. Megalania prisca goanna monitors lizards, Mosasaurs, Asprosaurus, Palaeosaniwa & Squamates abounded. 

For scores of moons, they sailed the saline sea, saw birds & beasts of all variety in many new lands, Pira (Iran), Khaiya (Pakistan), Bargai (India), Isa (Sri Lanka), Rof (Bangladesh), Narubu (Myanmar), Ki (Thailand), Darrar (Malasia), Wakindi (Indonesia), Azania (New Guinea), until at last they found arid ends of the Earth they called Auraʻaina (Australia). The travelers saw so many odd, scary & wonderful phenomena.

All along their meandering route, other Homos were extant. Paranthropus, sediba, habilis, rudolfensis, gautengensis, antecessor, erectus & ergaster, like them. Some were shy, social, aggressive, artistic, emotional, abstract, self-aware, curious. Others were not so much. Homo heidelbergensis, cepranensis, floresiensis, neanderthalensis, naledi, longi 'Dragon Man', tsaichangensis, luzonensis & sapiens, so-called modern humans, hadn't yet evolved. 

Years later, facing homeward & seeing now familiar shores, LUCA reviewed notches he put on memory logs to remind him of all they had learned on the voyage, nearly too much to fathom. Weather willing, soon he would regale village elders & youths alike with the greatest tale ever told. 

A palatial sky ship flew out of the sunrise & swept silently up to the flotilla, halting in midair gyroscopic wheels within wheels awhirl. LUCA's band gazed in awe overhead & were levitated aboard, watercrafts-in-tow. The vessel, later called a vimana, came to rest in a fertile crescent island paradise among 4 rivers named E.din. 

The Anunnaki from Nibiru were interplanetary visitors in search of monatomic gold to stabilize their atmosphere. LUCA et al were strangers outside their comfort zone too. Gold meant nothing to them, yet hunting, gathering, plant lore & medicine everything. Exploration was a local pursuit, not one across solar systems. Aliens had the advantage. 

At this pivotal moment in human history, encounters with advanced extraterrestrial beings, both had critical needs to fill & knowledge to share, whether realized or not. Melam covered the Anunnaki in an effulgence that caused them "terrifying splendor" & gave humans "the creeps" tingling physically. Heroes & demons also wore melam. 

Early exchanges favored Earthlings: farming, wheels, writing, mathematics, science, architecture, technology, genetic engineering, launching them from the Stone Age to the Space Age. The inspiration for divine beings, religions & gold fever, Anunnaki were the G.O.A.T. Curiosities at first, when filtering gold from seawater proved tedious, LUCA & company slaved away in southern African gold mines. 

Eventually, human overpopulation tried Anunnaki patience. Factions divided them & nuclear war broke out. In time, aliens went from omnipotent adored gods to uprooted nomads in hidden bases under sea or land. Perhaps their technological marvels let them metamorphose into a nano form of self-replicating xenobots by sweeping together loose stem cells to avoid detection & overconsumption of resources. That might help explain Fermi's Paradox or why we can't yet see any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life in a vast universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies with countless googolplexes of stars & planets offering only these 6 meager solutions. 

• 1. Rare Earth Hypothesis: This suggests that while microbial life might be common, the conditions required for complex, intelligent life are extremely rare. 
• 2. Great Filter: This theory posits that there is a stage in the evolution of life that is extremely difficult to surpass. 
• 3. Technological Immaturity or Self-Destruction: Civilizations might not last long enough to communicate or travel across interstellar distances. 
• 4. Zoo Hypothesis: This idea suggests that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations intentionally avoid contact with us to allow for natural evolution & sociocultural development, much like zookeepers do with animals.
• 5. Communication Challenges: It’s possible that extraterrestrial civilizations use communication methods we haven’t discovered yet, or that signals are too weak or too far away to detect with our current technology.
• 6. Simulation Hypothesis: Some theorists propose that we might be living in a simulated universe & the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial life is a deliberate aspect of the simulation.

Mankind enslaved, a prototype one world around sailing people, became interstellar trekkers in a galaxy empire. 

Legends of a great flood by divine retribution in Neolithic & Bronze Age prehistory were passed down by cultures worldwide, the best of which is the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumer roughly at the end of the Younger Dryas period, an estimated 12,900 to 11,700 years Before Present (BP). 

LUCA is an acronym for Last Universal Common Ancestor.