Human Spotting

Last month, NPR’s Robert Krulwich posted a photograph that got his blog readers talking.

This is the photo below.

As you can see, it’s not exactly controversial.

So why the backlash from readers?

Well it’s because Robert mentioned that this snapshot is soooo old, it could be one of the first photographs that captures a human (and by human, he meant that fuzzy guy who may be getting his shoes shined in the lower left quadrant).

Robert’s readers thought there was more to it. They started messing with the picture–cleaning it up (and colorizing it) via digital processes–and have since then identified four more possible humans in the shot.

I’m not sure what puzzles me more.

The fact that they bothered loading it into their photoshop programs and tweaking it to death.

Or the fact that they bothered to write Robert to let him know that this may be the first photo of five humans, not just one.

The point being, I guess, that if you have the right eye for it, there are a lot more humans around than you might notice at first glance.

And that, of course,  is the part of it all that I loved. Because most of us are so locked into our to-do lists that we run around just casually taking in our surroundings.

And we may accidentally miss the humans that share our little slice of the planet.