Human history: Murder most foul

Here at Abarim Publications we rarely get upset, but the chauvinism of the evolutionary paradigm has us frequently yawping barbarically over the roofs of the world.

Since Roman times folks have insisted that whatever is not like us is inferior, and this spawned in more recent times the idea that our anatomically identical ancestors must have been frightened oafs, huddled naked around campfires waiting for their big empty heads to somehow fill with the knowledge of how to farm and the good taste to appoint leaders to pliantly obey (at around 9,000 BC).

It has been said that we are a species with amnesia, but it's worse than that: cultural chauvinism has green lighted the murder most foul of countless millions of fellow moderns, and robbed the rest of us of our collective childhood.

Energy (what the material world is made of), DNA (what the biosphere is made of) and consciousness (what human culture is made of) have so much in common that they are most probable three iterations of one primary principle; three times the same basic idea. All three of these media showed up in its entirety out of nowhere and then stayed the same in essence but changed drastically in application, like a car that can be parked or roar down the highway all because that's what its essence allows.

The universe went from singularity (car parked) to its present form (car going 150 kph) because it has been able to do so from the beginning (when a brand new car rolled off the lot, for no apparent reason). Despite the play-down of certain people, life does the same thing. The mainstream estimate is that life started 4 billion years ago, as a myriad of tiny cells that all had our ancestral DNA in them.

This ancestral DNA was then (car parked) as vastly complex as it is now (car going 150). Much to the detriment of classical evolution theory: life didn't start out at the wheelbarrow level or even the bicycle level. It started fully-formed at the Model-T level and hasn't substantially changed since. Our most remote single cellular ancestor ran on the very same genetic software that all living things run on today; namely a colossal array of instructions written in a fully formed genetic language.

Life may change form, just like energy, but was wholly there from the get go.

The realm of consciousness follows the exact same profile: fully there from the beginning and lacking only convention (broad ranging intellectual agreement). Homo sapiens has been around for at least 200,000 years and they have always been exactly like us. They had our emotions, our sense of compassion, our theory of mind, or sense of planning, logic and problem solving.

Prior to the emergence of formal language (which requires advanced broad ranging agreement), people were just as smart as they are today and they certainly weren't mute. They had the same brains and voice boxes as we do and were able to imitate every animal in the forest. In fact, prior to the emergence of language, humans must have communicated largely via intonations and inflections, changes of pitch and rhythm and clacks and clicks made with the tongue and lips, which is precisely how their fellow creatures produced sounds.

In other words: ancient Homo Sapiens (and quite probably to some extent Australopithecus and Neanderthals as well) may not have spoken the king's English, they were fluent in lion, wildebeest, monkey and all the other animal "languages" in the world. Ancient humans understood precisely what an animal was on about when it produced vocal sound (signaling fear, anger, hunger, loneliness; all that) and was able to devise appropriate action. And because they most likely discussed animals by imitating the sound they made, the first real words were probably onomatopoeic; adaptations of animal sounds.

Unlike the parodial Flintstones, The Croods is indicative of the general changing attitude towards early man

From the get go, our ancestors told stories, laughed and cried, dreamed and plotted. Their minds were filled to the brim with knowledge about the natural world, and their ability to join forces made them practically invincible. Animal behavior could be predicted to such an extent that a daily patrol could keep vast areas confirmed clear of predators. Close cooperating human teams easily outsmarted giant lions and mastodons and killed them as a matter of routine. They strode the land proud as bears and nimble as packs of wolves. Our ancestors had absolutely nothing to fear. Compared to modern city slickers, ancient man truly lived in a garden of Eden

Humans are born problem solvers and the very fact that we barely changed our behavior for tens of thousands of years demonstrates that we had very few problems to solve. Most of the time, food came in oodles, just growing on trees. Studies show that ancient humans needed to spend only a little time on the necessities of life and could devote the rest of their time to socializing.

The Geissenklostere flute, dated to 40,000 BC, is one of many found

Forty-thousand year old, three and five-holed flutes were found in Germany, and whatever remains after such a long time must have been part of a huge collection. The German flutes were made of bone and ivory and must have taken a long time to make. That means that flutes and music were not invented the day before. Tens of thousands of years before of our ancestors took up farming, they must have been jamming away in the forest. There's no real reason to assume that they didn't form orchestras and choirs and took their craft as seriously as we do today.

Paintings from Chauvet Cave date from 30,000 BC

Around the same time that our ancestors started making music, they took up painting and sculpting and the very fact that so many Stone Age artifacts are still with us (occupied places usually stay occupied, and a living place that doesn't get redecorated for eons is extremely rare) means that the whole human world must have been littered with graffiti, then as much as now.

Our ancestors weren't quiet and they didn't hide. Quite the opposite. They were doing their utmost to get noticed. There was very little competition and the only thing humans could have craved was entertainment and excitement. Just like dolphins who spend most of their time playing, early humans must have played all the time, with whoever of the neighboring tribes cared to swing by.

The complex at Gobekli Tepe was built long before people began to farm or congregate in cities.

Just like our internet today, the internet of the old world served largely to stay up to snuff with the latest lyrics and campfire hits. So much even that they created elaborate central hubs long before they settled as farmers. The 10th millennium BC complex at Gobekli Tepe, for instance, has chagrined all the right people and shifted the paradigm away from the presumption that our foraging ancients were clueless brutes and toward the understanding that they had the grace and the skills but simply not the desire to give up living off the fat of the land, and only congregate at pow-wows.

Our ancestors had the same soif-de-vivre we have today. Tens of thousands of years before anybody took up farming, our ancestors had ships in the water, and they were most likely navigating by the stars. For no necessity or dire circumstance whatsoever, they crossed vast stretches of ocean and created colonies all over the world -- and a colony requires a bare minimal viable population of about 20 people, which means that a colony never happens by accident.

Man built whatever he wanted and went wherever he chose. He thrived and dominated the whole natural world long before he started to domesticate plants, animals and ultimately himself.