Say what now? ~2

Ho! - mankind

1.

”It's already (add year)!” someone cries when not getting their right way universally spread across all humankind … as if the year makes a difference. As if the humanity has somehow automatically become better and more, over time. As if people of the past were someone more stupid, less civilized, less human, even, and just less. What arrogance! What lack of knowledge! What level of somewhat mediocre humanity!

It’s been a time honored tradition to look down upon the past. Today, the 1980s looks like a musty collection of awful hairstyles, annoyingly bright and neon colors, knobby joysticks with one or maybe two buttons, cassettes with magnetic tapes for storage, car doors that said BANG! instead of the modern ”thup” and other simple technology for simpler people in simpler times. Oh yeah, and acid rain was, still, a thing. But, to them, a few decades back was just the same. People of that time thought the same of the people before. Along this line, we have gotten familiar with concepts like dark ages or a cave man that doesn’t really speak and clubs down a mating partner for ”cave activities”, if you know what I mean wink wink nudge nudge. For goodness’ sake, Neanderthal was originally named Homo Stupidus and for over a century believed to be primitive, unintelligent and brutish. Sort of like a cave monkey. Even today, there are many people who doubt things like their ability to speak or be able to, per se, do ”human things”. However, a lot of evidence has come to light to prove they were equipped with at least the same intellectual potential as the ”modern human”.

None of this should come as a surprise, really. But to most, it always does. Even with all the evidence around them. What if I were to boldly suggest that people, in potential, have been the same for thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of years? What if I were to claim that as a generic lump of ”civilized human beings” we have not advanced much, if at all, over a few hundred thousand years? In technology, sure. In the amount of knowledge, yes. In education spread more wide and more openly? Absolutely. In many superficial ways, yes. In core? … Sounds ludicrous to you? Let’s have a look at the achievements of the past.

2.

In the 1960s, we went to space. In 1903, we were learning to fly. In the 1700s we had the likes of J.S. Bach and Mozart banging out those classical hits, and such as Adam Smith and Voltaire explaining how the world works. Also, someone developed the first commercially successful steam engine (not Watt, by the way). In the 1500s, we had Michelangelo with his pretty amazing sculptures and paintings. In the 1300s we already had naval mines and multistage rockets as described by Jiao Yu in his military manuscript. In 670 we had Greek fire no one has been able to replicate in modern times. By the late 500s we had matches and toilet paper. In the 200s CE, the Chinese were printing text and images (woodblock printing). From around 300 BCE we started to have feats or Roman engineering such as roads that still stand today (what potholes?) and analog computers that were used e.g. to ”read the celestial objects” a.k.a. to calculate astronomical positions. During ~600 BCE we had Daodejing (still very descriptive of human kind), steel, prosthetic limbs and plastic surgery. Around 1400 BCE we had rubber (Mesoamerica), ~2500 BCE we had a dictionary (Mesopotamia), ~3000 BCE we had nose jobs (Egypt), ~4000 BCE plumbing (Babylonia), ~7000 BCE fermented alcohol (China), ~30,000 BCE star charts (France/Spain), ~43,000 BCE tally sticks (Eswatini), ~100,000 compound paint (South Africa), ~200,000 glue (Italy), ~400,000 BCE bone tools with special design (Castel di Guido, Italy), ~500,000 BCE hafting and presumed earliest use of manufactured clothes, ~900,000 BCE boats. Just to mention a few feats.

Could a knuckle dragging speechless ape with an IQ lower than your boot size really achieve all this? I don’t think so. I also don’t think that we have nearly all evidence of human achievement or the correct timeline of things. For example, the Assyrian lion hunt reliefs were carved very precisely on stone in circa 645 BCE. According to many experts of the trade, the material and the preciseness of the work would have required something such as special steel tools to make it happen. Steel that, supposedly, came around half a century later. Art has often been seen as a sign of intelligence, creativity and ability to higher level abstract thinking. A sign of smarts, if you will. Well over ten thousand years ago, people painted very skillful work using a variety of paint and other substances (e.g. fat), showing understanding of light, color scheme and contour for three-dimensional shape (see cave art at Altamira, for example). At least 30,000 years old cave art of roughly similar level of advancement has been found all over the world (from Spain to Indonesia) and the oldest surviving flute (Germany) is from around the same time.

The religious people (that I’ve met, anyway) claim ownership to god and afterlife as a few thousand years old concept. Grinding teeth, they may accept some naïve versions of it in Ancient Egypt at around ten- to twenty thousand years back, or so. However, already circa 100,000 BCE people were buried in the Middle East, with food and tools. This implying a concept of an afterlife of some kind, which would tell of religious concepts in times where ”not quite human” species were supposed to roam the earth. How often have you seen a legit religious monkey with rituals and all?

The modern human, the pinnacle of our existence is better at everything than those uncivilized other people. You know, the ones with the wrong place of birth in geographical location or time and so on. Yet, many struggle to understand how or why many things are. The pyramids of Egypt, Moai, the Stonehenge… Many struggle and fail to replicate inventions of the past. A lot has been lost in time. A lot of events have taken place such as destruction of Baghdad, of library of Alexandria, the partial loss of clay tablets of Nineveh and so many other things we don’t even know of. The natural disasters and the elements eat away human achievement. The master – disciple line of information can end in an accident or petty murders. The schools, the educated people, the holders of mysteries were quite secretive and protective of their information. Many of them wrote in code/symbols or swore to take their secrets to the grave. Many of them made many enemies and lost their lives for it. Who knows what they knew. Probably more than how to peel a banana for haute cuisine, or how to go clubbing for ladies for the artsy cave party like it’s 35,000 BCE… which we are a super volcano, nuke or a big fat solar flare away from to-day.

Other things of interest

2½.

A lot of the time, you see the picture of evolution with, pretty much, a monkey turning into a modern human. A lot of the time you might, at most, hear of Homo Sapiens, Erectus and Neanderthal, sort of mostly assuming that they are more or less one ’real’ human aka you and an offshoot that just vanished like the early European settlements in North America. Obviously, because they were somehow weak and deficient or something. However, for a long time, it’s been known that there are at least nine different human species (”hominins”). Now, at least around fifteen are suggested to have existed. Many of these at the same time with one another. Homo Sapiens, Neanderthal and the Denisovan are the most prominent right now, with a lot of new findings pouring in from the scientific community. Others such as the ”Hobbits” in Indonesia (extinct between 30,000-18,000 BCE) are sometimes mentioned. What if most of the human species did not go extinct, after all? What if we’re all some form of hybrids? It’s, more or less, known that Sapiens and Neanderthal banged. Neanderthals banged Denisovans and Sapiens banged these, either separately or as hybrids. Why not the others as well? Just raising thoughts.

We do know, in the light of current knowledge, that some ”hominid” species did go extinct. The species that did go extinct happened to all be vegans. The meat eaters grew bigger and better brains, among other things, and took over the world to share among themselves. Talking about extinction, it turns out to be just a normal phase of evolution (editor note: previous based on a BBC story that has now been removed). So extinction rebellion… come on! Stop blocking the next stage of our evolution.

2½+½.

It turns out that the human kind has, most likely, been a matriarchal society for the most of our existence. If we are to believe evidence left behind, then for at least 25,000 years or longer before our current ”patriarchal era”, the humans were matriarchal societies. The patriarchy started to take over especially when people started to live in stable locations (instead of nomadic life of hunter gatherers) and in particular, the Ancient Greece seems to be a turning point and a breeding ground for the patriarchy as we know it.

The ending statement of sorts

We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants. Giants hidden under the soil increased each time one of us soil ourselves to drip over the past times. This must mean that I am the greatest and, if you don’t like it… Well, I’ll fly to Mars and start a new humankind. With blackjack… and hookers. In fact, forget the humankind.