Ancestors

Humans became anatomically identical to you and me about 300,000 years ago (at the time of writing, anyway; this number is contentious and changes a lot). But the first time humans advanced past the hunter-gatherer stage and formed permanent settlements is only 10,000 years ago.

Cleopatra lived closer to the present day than to the time the pyramids were built - and the pyramids were only built about 5,000 years ago. Ten thousand years is a really fucking long time, and most people consider that to be the entirety of civilization’s history. The discovery of agriculture was, ostensibly, the first human event worth remembering.

But you’ll also notice that even ten thousand years is very small compared to 300,000. Humans have essentially occupied the same bodies for such a long period of time that our entire history of every civilization that ever existed fits inside it thirty times.

It’s also worth noting that it will only take about ten thousand years for the forces of nature to erase every sign of our civilization if we all disappeared today. After that point it would take some very clever archaeologists with an understanding of carbon emissions to know that we were, in our own eyes, advanced. So if a civilization ended more than 20,000 years ago (AKA within the first 94% of biologically modern humanity’s existence), there would be virtually no evidence of their existence at all by the time our first permanent settlements were being made.

Sorry, I got a little off track there. I just watched Joe Scott’s video about ancient civilizations.

The thing that really blows my mind is just imagining what kinds of people lived, say, 150,000 years ago. Humans as we know them had already existed for another 150,000 years, but a super cool invention just dropped - it’s the power of spoken language. I would sell my soul to eavesdrop on a conversation between humans fifteen times older than the first civilization we currently have the wisdom to learn about. If my minimal reading about pre-history serves me well, they discussed the stars and how to navigate by them. They exchanged their observations about the changes in the seasons that could be predicted and harnessed. But what about the millions of other conversations between families, friends, enemies, and lovers? When children asked Why do trees lose their leaves in the winter? what answers were they given? Surely our ancestors had their theories as to why things happened. What songs did they sing? What did they consider worth remembering?

Most amazing of all, there is a direct lineage connecting those humans to you. Yes, motherfucker, you.

If you’re like me, you find it relatively easy to imagine that your deceased loved ones are watching over you right now (even if you don’t believe that to be literally true). But how far back does that go? Are we supervised by ancestors from not one… not two… but 12,000 generations? God, I hope so. I want to meet them very badly.