Foreshadowings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 34

I believe, though I have no means of showing that this proposition
is true, that in both cases I was experiencing a genetic memory.
Through the greater part of human existence, while we were still sub-
ject to natural selection, we were shaped by imperatives - the need to
feed, defend and shelter ourselves, to reciprocate and work together,
to breed and to care for our children - which ensured that certain
suites of behaviour became instinctive. They could be suppressed by
thought but, like the innate response which makes a pensioner vault
over a ive-foot wall just before a truck ploughs into him, they evolved
to guide us, alongside the slower processes of the conscious mind
(which is shaped by learning and experience). These genetic memories -
these unconsidered urges - are printed onto our chromosomes, an
irreducible component of our identity.
Some of these stereotyped responses - like the instinctive ways in
which we care for our children - are still appropriate and necessary.
Others - such as the instincts which once helped us to defend ourselves
and our families from both predators and competing clans - can cause
disaster, in densely populated, technologically amplified societies, when
they are unleashed. We have had to learn techniques of containment, to
press our roaring blood into quieter channels. Where these urges are
familiar to us, experience has taught us how to suppress or redirect
them. But this sensation was new. I could not assimilate it because -
until I picked up the deer - I had been unaware of its existence. It was
overwhelming, raw, feral. I did not have a place to put it; but I knew
that it belonged to me as much as the tendons I use to curl my fingers.
On the Welsh shore of the Severn estuary, archaeologists working
with farmyard slurry scrapers have swept away 8,000 years of mud to
reveal a fossil saltmarsh platform so well preserved that, when you see
photographs of the footprints they have found, you look beyond for
the beasts and people that left them. The Goldcliff excavation tells the
story of a world before ours, to which we still belong. 2
Some of the prints, left in loose mud, are big and sloshy; others
clean and crisp. You can see the pads of the toes and the mud that
welled up between them: the marks look as fresh as if they had been
made on this tide. In some places the people had slipped and skidded,
the tracks show how their heels swung round, their toes splayed to