Well, guess what - my direct ancestral material was there. Not in human form, obviously, and maybe not even in what we would consider organic form, though the line between organic and inorganic is narrowing. But, it was there in some form, otherwise the chain of being would have been broken. The result, though, is that if I reject the possibility of spontaneous creation, of something coming into being from nothing, I have to consider the possibility that my direct chain of being is eternal and includes distant relatives that couldn't shop at K-Mart.
Another interesting implication of the idea that kicked-off this discussion is that all of us living today must be much more closely related than we think.
Since, according to Chenowski's chain of being theory, every person always had a living direct ancestor, the current 6.5 billion folks that walk the planet have to share some direct ancestors since the population of the earth was much smaller in the distant past.
Let's see how this works out.
6.5 billion people live today. 250 million people were alive in 950 A.D. That means 6.5 billion people share only 250 million ancestors. But, go back to 10,000 B.C. and an estimated total population of only 1 million, and we're suddenly much more closely related - we're 6.5 billion people sharing only 1 million ancestors.
The further back you go, the more closely related we become.
I call this Chenowski's chain of being to avoid confusion with a competing theory, the great chain of being, attributed to Plato and Aristotle, which is essentially a qualitative ranking of things, from God down to rocks. Unlike the great chain, the Chenowski chain unifies instead of segregates, focuses on commonality instead of difference.
Adding my name to the idea is tongue in cheek, but the concept isn't frivolous. In a world bent on division, an idea that unifies deserves consideration.
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