I arrived home from work last Thursday and found a large surprise gathering in my yard: it was my father, and grandfather, and great-grandfather; and also his father, and his, and his, and so on. It was a tremendous crowd. All my direct male ancestors were here, running back (I eventually learned) through the entire history of human speech.

There was substantial overflow, as you can imagine. Approximately three thousand fathers spilled out into other yards, and the street, and onto the elementary school grounds across from our back yard. Many of them toward the front, including my father and grandfather, quieted as I rolled up on my bicycle, but most of those behind continued chatting with each other. All their talk added up to a warm little roar. It was a gorgeous day, sunny; a perfect time for these three thousand to gather. 

It was wonderful to see my father, for the first time in nine years, and of course my grandfather, still hale as ever. My great-grandfather was the only other man I recognized. I had seen him before, in two family photos, smiling across the years in wedding portraits. He was a jovial man with a bold white mustache; gregarious, though quiet with me since he didn’t speak English. These were three lucky ethnic Germans: either too young (in my father’s case) or too old to have been swept up in any Twentieth Century crimes.

Everyone there but me was apparently at the age of his death, approximately, but right before any final downturn in health. My father looked very good; apparently in his late sixties before his cancer had become apparent. Behind my beaming great-grandfather stood a knot of other Germans, most of them looking similar: old, and hale. Sturdy farmers who had enjoyed long lives. These were the men who had lived outside what is today Germany, the oldest having left Swabia around 1700. They had all apparently lived fairly well, judging by their age and stature. 

My father never taught me German, I’m afraid, so he was the only one I could really converse with. Even his father, my grandfather, who moved to the United States well into his fifties, never became fluent in English. Attention, bilingual parents! Remember to share your languages with your children.

Beyond this near group were more Germans, and some of them had died young. A few of these younger ones seemed thin, perhaps pale, and I guessed they had not been well. A couple other of the younger ones looked very strong, and I assumed they had either been killed by soldiers or had been soldiers themselves. (There were no boys present, of course; every man there, necessarily, had been at least old enough to father another.) This group had a vigorous conversation under way, but I noticed that a few on the edge seemed to squint, and incline their heads, and not completely follow. I learned that these on the margin had lived about seven hundred years ago, or more, and were not able to fully understand the modern German spoken by the later ones. My father led me around this group, but eventually had to enlist the help of a second translator as he tried to chat with yet another smiling farmer from perhaps the thirteenth century. This man would later have to ask for help himself as he worked his way back about fifteen generations. Words were passed up and down chains of translators. I had hoped to have an ancestor who was a citizen of the Roman Empire, speaking Latin, but apparently my family was one of strictly barbarian Germanic tribesmen from the wrong side of the river.

The conversations were wonderful, even as they went through multiple translations. The men spoke of their wives and other children, and the farming they had done, and the kingdoms in which they had lived for better or worse. But it got to the point where my father’s German translated through another’s Middle German, translated through that one’s Saxon language, and then through another’s Ingvaeonic, and then another’s Proto-German, and so on, became too cumbersome. Eventually I left my father as he tried to talk chess with an apparent tenth-century North Sea mariner, and I moved back a few more thousand years, and then a few thousand more.

And now the crucial question, the obvious question, the glaring absence: Where were all the mothers? Why was this event the very definition of patriarchy? How much insight and wisdom and pride was I missing out on for the lack of all my mothers? I don’t know why they were not there, and I didn’t see any organizers around to ask. Perhaps it was simply not time to meet them yet, since my mother is still living.

My fathers were amiable, and seemed to get along with one another quite well. I am aware that cynics who consider history to be nothing but nastiness and brutality would have assumed that some, or even many, of these fathers and sons would be unknown to each other, because the father would have been an invader who took a woman by force and left her to raise an unwanted son; but honestly I did not notice any of that. Perhaps my much-extended family was short on adventurers, and centurions, and kings, and had been forgotten to history; but on the bright side, each generation seemed at least willing to converse with the previous.

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I shook hands, smiled, bowed, and nodded. Here was a middle-aged man looking like the Germans but wearing a fur. Here was yet another farmer with rough hands, in a leather shirt. He clapped me on the back. Now I came upon a teen-ager, shy and smiling. I realized I looked old to him even though he predated me by ten thousand years or more. 

By that point I was working my way through a large crowd of my forefathers who looked strikingly alike. I felt I was surrounded by scores of Otzis the Icemen. They were weathered men, well-muscled, wearing animal furs, many carrying spears or walking sticks. I remember reading that the people who made cave paintings in Europe drew essentially the same things for thousands and thousands of years; and here they were, looking alike in the same way that they had drawn alike. It was not hard to believe that they had indeed hewed to tradition.

There were certainly teenagers among these cave-era men, but a good number were middle-aged or older. This gave the lie to the old canard that our ancestors lived on average only to age thirty; that might have been the average lifespan at the time, but males who made it out of their childhood very often made it to fifty or beyond. I saw the evidence before me. There was a lot of gray hair, going back all those thousands of years in my family.

Once I went back far enough all my fathers were Black, of course. Before I got to them I smiled and nodded to numbers of men I would describe as Semitic-looking; past that group, all were African. (My fathers were not all standing in a line, but nonetheless they were grouped together broadly by chronology. The ones I took to be the earliest Europeans were in a crowd down the street from my house, and then the ones who looked more African started on the school grounds. They were not mingling more than a few centuries away from their time.) I would have guessed that these African fathers of mine would have looked Ethiopian, or Eritrean, since I assumed that’s what northeast Africans looked like before they left the continent. And I know that Ethiopians and Eritreans tend to have a certain look, because there are many of them in the metro area where I live; it’s easy to tell them apart from Ghanaians, Sudanese, and so on. But of course my fathers looked different. Today’s people in the Horn of Africa, and Egypt, don’t look like those who were there fifty or sixty thousand years ago, when a father of mine first crossed into the Middle East. My African fathers were simply good-looking men, dark-skinned but hard to place today. They were spry, and bright-eyed. They had lived expansive lives, I imagined, with the entire world outside Africa lying empty before them. (Well, it was empty except for Neanderthals and Denisovans and any other backward cousins, I suppose. Despite the jokes my wife likes to make, none of these direct fathers of mine appeared to be a Neanderthal.)

I realize that the date of the advent of human speech is a topic of debate among linguists, anthropologists, and others; but I had the answer here in my yard (and down the street, in the school yard, etc.). About three thousand men were present, so that means we had speech about one hundred thousand years ago, or perhaps ninety thousand – something along those lines. Can we guess that the average age of each father in his child-siring years was about thirty? That would have taken us back ninety thousand years. Yes, some of these men would have fathered children when they were fourteen, but others were still doing so at forty or fifty. Let’s use thirty as an average, then. 

I walked through many generations of friendly African men, all my direct ancestors, and all apparently glad to see me. Everyone in the crowd seemed to understand who they all were, and who I was. (And of course everyone but me was able to reunite with his son as well as his father. I do have a son, but he was not home yet—what a day to stay late at school.)

My oldest father, my first speaking father, was a modest African man surrounded by a knot of his proud descendants back by a goal on the soccer field on the elementary school grounds. His son and grandsons, et cetera, smiled at me and pointed him out. They were all strong, sinewy men wearing barely any clothes, some with beaded strings and necklaces. 

I could tell that his speech was basic. Some of the later generations there babbled to him, and laughed, and touched his arm with affection, but he said little. His sentences were brief when he did talk. 

How would we define the first true speech? We can guess that a given son of pre-speech parents did not spring forth reciting sonnets, but at what point would we draw the line? This man’s language was not grunts; he clearly could speak in sentences. Perhaps this African father of mine was the first who could get an idea across without using any gestures. Perhaps he was the first who could speak of an abstract idea: of love, or a plan, or a regret, instead of just tonight’s fire or yesterday’s hunt.

Were hominids speaking two million years ago? Almost certainly not; and if they were, just slide the window back a million years at a time and you soon get to ape-men with nothing that we would call true speech. So that’s the earliest possible date by which we had real language. And were we speaking eight thousand years ago? Of course. So where do we draw the line—when we began humming to our babies? Or shouting warnings? Or singing nonsense, mimicking birds?

Well, it turns out we draw it with this Black father of mine standing there shyly by the soccer goal. He held his hands clasped before him. I could only bow to him, and then touch his shoulder and smile, and greet him. He was content to listen, and perhaps regard his long, long line of descendants with pride. We were, in the most basic sense, a successful family.