One Family

Every stranger you pass is your distant cousin — and the reason why is stranger than the fact itself. At some point in the past, the entire human species nearly ceased to exist. Not in a war, not in a flood, not in any disaster anyone witnessed and recorded. In a silence. The genetic evidence buried inside every living person tells the same story: at some point, the number of humans breeding on Earth dropped so low that the species nearly vanished — estimates range from a few hundred to perhaps a few thousand individuals. Fewer people than fit inside a school gymnasium. Every human alive today — seven billion of us, then eight, then more — descended from that remnant. The cousins who passed you on the street this morning, the strangers in cities you will never visit, the people who speak languages you will never hear — all of them carry the same narrow inheritance. The same small group's fears, their genes, the particular shape of their immune systems. We don't know exactly what happened. A volcanic winter is the leading suspect. But the bottleneck is written into your blood whether you know it or not. You are not merely related to every stranger. You are all, improbably, survivors of the same catastrophe — and you don't remember it.