THE DISCOVERIES OF TODAY THAT WILL DEFINE THE WORLD OF TOMORROW
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICEMBARK
VOL. 236 NO. 2IN THIS SECTION
Greening Utensils
Crocs and Rocks
Meteorite Vault
Orchid’s VisitorA
BY MOHSIN HAMIDHUMANS ARE A MIGRATORY SPECIES, YET SOME WOULD DIVIDE US
INTO TWO KINDS: THE MIGRANT AND THE NATIVE.
We Are All
Migrants
ALL OF US ARE DESCENDED from migrants. Our
species, Homo sapiens, did not evolve in Lahore,
where I am writing these words. Nor did we evolve
in Shanghai or Topeka or Buenos Aires or Cairo or
Oslo, where you, perhaps, are reading them.
Even if you live today in the Rift Valley, in Africa,
mother continent to us all, on the site of the earliest
discovered remains of our species, your ancestors
too moved—they left, changed, and intermingled
before returning to the place you live now, just as I
left Lahore, lived for decades in North America and
Europe, and returned to reside in the house where my
grandparents and parents once did, the house where
I spent much of my childhood, seemingly indigenous
but utterly altered and remade by my travels.
None of us is a native of the place we call home.
And none of us is a native to this moment in time.
We are not native to the instant, already gone, when
this sentence began to be written, nor to the instant,