The fact is we are all migrants
I wonder how you react to the latest tale of rescue of migrants from the Mediterranean Sea or the Indian Ocean? It must take a very hard heart to cause anyone seeing a photograph of a sinking boat with hundreds of poor distressed humans or of a weeping emaciated mother clinging to her dead child not to feel pity, to realise the need for something to be done.
And yet our governments and newspapers seem to emphasise the need for us to exclude foreigners from our shores, preferring the burden of caring for these desperate people to fall on Greece and Italy, as if those countries did not have enough problems of their own already. How can it be that in our rich country, where so many of us have houses and cars, money for foreign holidays, and enough food to make us one of the fattest populations in the world, that we cannot afford to open our doors a bit wider? After all, we are all the children of migrants and, but for the grace of God, could ourselves be migrants again.
In my lifetime the first wave of migrants to this unwelcoming country was of Jewish and other persecuted people fleeing Hitler. Britain was not short of anti-Jewish sentiment at the time and most were interned in the Isle of Man for a while as enemy aliens, where they set up their own university and where the Amadeus quartet was born. Subsequently, many of these fortunate survivors have made a disproportionately great contribution to science and the arts in the West. Later, many economic migrants arrived from the West Indies and then as refugees from the tyranny of Idi Amin, clutching their British passports. Immigrants ran our railways, did menial jobs, staffed the NHS, and set up small businesses.
Towards the end of my career teaching medical students, I became used to the front two rows of lecture theatres being occupied by the bright eager faces of their second and third generations. And this is the tragic but unsurprising story of migration; tragic because our gain represents a loss to their homeland, unsurprising because it is a form of natural selection whereby the strongest survive and thrive but the weakest go under. It is the story of Homo sapiens.
The story of Homo sapiens has recently been described by Stephen Oppenheimer in his book ‘Out of Eden’ in which he makes a masterly synthesis of recent genetic research on populations with evidence of the earth’s climate and the archeological record, enabling him to postulate the time course of the migrations of our species out of Africa to populate the world. It has proved possible, using mitochondrial and Y chromosome DNA, to show that all existing humans can be traced back to one female and probably three males who migrated out of Africa between 80,000 and 100,000 years ago. It is likely that lack of rainfall drove them from their hunting grounds and their escape route across the southern extremity of the Red Sea was enabled by the much lower sea level during that ice age – both consequences of climate change.
The survivors of those few migrants settled in southern Arabia and some made their way round the coast (the Arabian Gulf did not exist then) of the Indian subcontinent to the Far East and Australia, living as beachcombers. Australia was colonised about 70,000 years ago, while sea levels were still low. Four thousand years before this a massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia appears to have wiped out the earliest settlers in India, cutting off those left in South Arabia. By about 50,000 years ago some of these had moved northwards, allowed by another change in climate to cross the desert and gain access to the Middle East, Europe and North Africa.
Others migrated north up the great rivers of East India and across to Asia, meeting those who had taken the earlier coastal route, and by about 25,000 years ago had occupied a habitable land mass between Siberia and Alaska, allowing them to move down into North and then South America. By 10,000 years ago, the world was populated and we were all brothers and sisters.
Of course, you will know that Scotland and much of northern Europe was covered with ice from about 20,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our small bit of this story is a bit less straightforward. There had been earlier migrations out of Africa, by a more northern route, of Neanderthal man and other hominids and it is likely that they shared a foothold in Europe before 20,000 years ago; indeed recent DNA evidence shows that there had been some interbreeding between H neanderthalensis and H sapiens, though judging from more recent migrations it is more likely that they fought and killed each other. However, the last ice age dealt the neanderthals and the even more successful survivor, H erectus, the final blow.
As the climate changed once again, homo sapiens, demonstrating superior adaptability, managed to migrate back to refuges in southern Europe from which, when the climate moderated, he made his way back. By sometime around 10,000 years ago he had, as Mesolithic man, even established settlements in Scotland close to my home in Edinburgh and further north, still living on the sea shores. Since then of course we have been joined by more central European Celts, Picts, Romans, Saxons, Norman French, Vikings and English, though our earlier Celtic ancestors, the Welsh, have now been confined further south only, leaving traces of their occupation and language in place names.
As a small community on the western fringe of Europe we are at the mercy of factors beyond our control. The most important of these are the climate and territorial disputes. We have a merciful climate and a population famed for its inventiveness and spirit of adventure – no surprise in view of our heritage as survivors of many migrations. This has led to us giving our hybrid language to most of the world and to our relative prosperity. Small wonder that, like our ancestors, the current dispossessed and persecuted of the world wish to come here, and to risk their lives again and again to get here. What would you do if you lived in Syria, central Africa, or Borneo and saw no hope? Had the Nazis invaded, how many of us would be here now? The least we can do is encourage our mean-minded contemporaries and elected representatives to accept that a fair proportion of the problem is for us to deal with and to recognise that it will ultimately be to our benefit. We can be sure that with increasing climate change and associated warfare and starvation, the problem will only get worse.
By Anthony Seaton | July 2015