microchimera

I've mentioned chimeras before. Turns out, I might be right about my mother being a chimera... but for reasons that I wouldn't have imagined. It seems that a lot of women may be a combination of genetic material other than their usual parental stuff.

Any time a woman becomes pregnant, her body may incorporate dna from the fetus. While the material usually goes away over time, apparently it can persist through a lifetime and even be shared with a later fetus too. The exchange occurs whether the fetus matures through birth or not. Since it's likely that most human conceptions end in miscarriage, that's a whole lot of genetic creativity being introduced to women's already mature bodies, whether they're ever aware of being pregnant or not.

"With each successive conception, the mother’s reservoir of foreign material grows deeper and more complex, with further opportunities to transfer cells from older siblings to younger children, or even across multiple generations. Far from drifting at random, human and animal studies have found foetal origin cells in the mother’s bloodstream, skin and all major organs, even showing up as part of the beating heart. This passage means that women carry at least three unique cell populations in their bodies – their own, their mother’s, and their child’s – creating what biologists term a microchimera, named for the Greek fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent.
...
But this unfolding field of research, advanced by Nelson and others, suggests that we humans are not oppositional but constituent beings, made of many. Nelson, who is fond of referencing the poet Walt Whitman’s multitudes, says we need a ‘new paradigm of the biological self’."
- https://aeon.co/essays/microchimerism-how-pregnancy-changes-the-mothers-very-dna

Thanks to our growing understanding of our microbiome, we're also finally aware that less than half of the cellular units in our body are even human. Most of them are microbiological organisms hosted upon and within us.

"Human cells make up only 43% of the body's total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists. ... The field is even asking questions of what it means to be "human" and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result."
- https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43674270

The very idea of "man" as a singular creature of unique importance is clearly flawed.

We are much more interesting than that.  And absolutely everything is connected.