we are all migrants!

Anyone reading the current tirades about hordes of people on the move -- heading for a place near them -- might gain the impression that migration is something new, bad or 'foreign'. Far from it. We are all migrants!

Human beings, like all living creatures - animal or vegetable - are migratory. Either blown by the wind or migrating seasonally, like wildlife, there is an innate migratory feature in the human makeup, too.

And it should never be forgotten that we are animals. As David Suzuki reminds us, our taxonomic classification is: "Kingdom: Animalia; Phylum: Chordata; Class: Mammalia; Order: Primates; Family: Hominidae; Genus: Homo; Species: sapiens."

Recent DNA evidence supports the fossil and other evidence that modern humans - Homo sapiens - evolved from a common African ancestor who, because of the amazing fecundity of the Congo River system rainforest, was more likely to have originated in Equatorial Africa than in any other region.

Starting with the Family Hominidae, the first migrants were the descendants of the Pleistocene 'Adam and Eve' from whom we are all related. These were our Equatorial African ancestors who lived along the Congo River system between the Highlands of Cameroon and the East African mountain ranges in a land mass called Pangaea where all continents were joined - allowing easy migration to all corners of the present world.

Unlike the hairless, white-skinned, tall and perfectly formed Adam and Eve of Eden depicted in Judaic-Christian literature -- or the Enki and Ninhursag of Dimun depicted in the Sumeric literature
from which it derived -- our actual ancestors are likely to have been a lot hairier, blacker and less erect than the pygmies who still inhabit the Equatorial African region.

Our earliest ancestors, over millions of years, evolved into different species such as Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and, possibly, Homo floresiensis - all of which co-existed at some point in history - but only Homo sapiens succeeded in surviving the cataclysmic geological and climatic events that may or may not have wiped out the others.

It's possible, of course, that Homo sapiens simply committed genocide and wiped out the other species in the same way that we now commit 'ethnic cleansing' on people we call 'immigrants' -- no matter how many centuries they've lived with us, or we with them -- because their appearance, culture or religion is different to ours.

If we all accepted the evidence of history that every one of us came from somewhere else originally, we may be better disposed to treat immigrants as one of us rather than as aliens.