Full disclosure: I do not know what I am talking about. I am reaching into the dark forest of my mind and retelling the frightening facts that accost me on my meanderings. If someone knows better than me, fact-check, for sure.
This story starts, as all good stories do, 6 million years ago. The Sahara was NOT a desert. The Serengeti was NOT a savanna. And our ancestors lived a more vertical life than most do now.
In the dense forest that one day, humans with their need to reduce things to easy mental handles would call “The Serengeti”, primates swung through the trees, teetering suspiciously from their growing brains but otherwise not planning anything special. But fate had other plans, as it does. The Sahara was turning into a desert. This was causing the neighboring Serengeti to morph from forest to savanna slowly.
As the primates who lived there lost their homes over the eons, some of them adapted. They learned to walk upright, a distinct advantage to scan the grasslands for predators, especially as there were no handy trees to leap into in the event they were beset.
But not all the primates took to foot. An admittedly decreasing number still thrived in the shrinking forest. And when the savanna-adapted cousins found themselves forced to forage in the midst of the trees, they were gazed upon by jealous eyes from the foliage. When the flatfooted ventured too far into the trees, the tree swingers were more than happy to confront them. Using superior numbers and vertical strategies that the flatfooted were no longer adapted to counter, the tree swingers terrorized the intruders, driving them back or even killing them for daring to steal resources. For daring to thrive in the savanna that had claimed so much of the home of the tree swingers, lessening them year after year.
As the flatfooted developed the foundation of symbolic language, stories were told. About the fearsome power of those that dwelt in the forests. So much like them, yet so alien, as well. The morals of the stories were straightforward. There is danger lurking in the trees. On the grass, you can see the lion approaching and run. In the trees. danger will spring on you when you least expect it. Worse yet, the tree swingers were far more clever than the swift and strong lions. They used cunning to lure and confuse the flatfooted should they wander into the heart of their power.
Time marched on. The forest shrunk to the point where the tree swingers could no longer maintain their genetic diversity and collapsed. But the fear of something like them continues. A large part of our folklore is about the things that lurk in the woods. Or the water. Or anywhere that the command of our environment ends, and raw nature takes over. But more so – the fear of something can outthink us. That seems so hauntingly similar and yet unsettlingly different at the same time.
As our folklore turned into Urban Fantasy, the tradition continues. Where unrepaired streetlights cast their darkness, there is danger. Not from distracted driving or transfats. But from something that wants you dead for the simple crime of your thriving.
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