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lilacchao · 3 months ago

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what is a human?

let's start with archaic humans in the pleistocene, the last ice age, spanning from 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, when the world looked something like this (note in particular the interconnectedness and the lack of sahara desert)

2.8 million years ago, it was the great ape megafauna homo habilis

along with their self-domesticated australopith ancestors, they had stone tools and medicine, but they brought a huge increase in brain size to the table, allowing impressive dexterity and agility compared to other great apes (and possibly introducing the chirality we still see today - there's evidence of right-vs-left-handedness!)

they were careful scavengers, having to avoid predators like leopards while stealing their food, and would butcher their meat with stone tools for their large communities of potentially nearly a hundred (based on some very flakey correlations)

to a homo habilis, to be human meant to be more skilled than your neighbours, better with tools, better at hiding and climbing, better with food, better at coexisting with your kind - death might be waiting around the corner, but if you were quick enough you might get away, and you had an extra set of eyes through your friends

2 million years ago, it was also homo erectus

these widespread travellers walked the land in a new way - literally, this is where the human gait originates! they would scavenge and wield fire, and are thought to have been far more effective hunters than ever before (though with plenty of gathering and scavenging food through other means alongside their hunting), and they travelled far enough to leave africa and find their ways to europe and asia

to a homo erectus, to be human did not just mean to be more skilled than your neighbours, but to be more free than them - you could run far, and rely on your talents to get food wherever you found yourself (especially if you ran far in order to hunt said food)! life was an adventure, and you were ready for it

~750 thousand years ago, it became a bit of a muddle, people fight over whether and when to make new species classifications and what descends from what, so im just gonna say: the widespreadness of homo erectus led to a lot of new types of guy, and we don't know how many or in what order yet - to be human meant to be part of this puzzling new trend of giant scary hominids

~500 thousand years ago in europe, some neanderthal traits existed in humans in europe, and in isolated cold groups these traits got exaggerated (alongside an unfortunate lack of genetic diversity with. the usual problems from that), leading to what we call neanderthals

they collected pretty shells, used ochre, and some groups of neanderthals knew how to do things as complicated as making birch bark glue! but they lived in very small isolated communities, so their knowledge didn't tend to spread far

to a neanderthal, to be human was to be in a family, and to help your family survive even the harshest winters as they do the same for you

~500 thousand years ago in asia, denisovans emerged - not many remains survive, so little is known, but they wore jewellery and there's a place where a child and a teenager played together by filling an area of mud with hand- and footprints, which is adorable

to a denisovan, to be human was... to be playful, probably? there's really not much i can find

~250 thousand years ago in the horn of africa, homo sapiens emerged

it's a poor name, there are more notable traits here than the "sapience" we've been seeing plenty of, but it predates having to distinguish multiple species of homo

they never met homo erectus, but existed alongside other archaic humans in africa for about 200,000 years (a period called "the middle paleolithic"), distinguishing themselves with their strangely shaped (to other archaic humans, not to us) skulls and fragile skeletons - they were so weak they'd have to work together to accomplish basic tasks! but they were highly social, happy to work together, loved to trade resources to provide other communities with the resources they lack (but had not yet reached "behavioural modernity", judging by the fossil record)

by ~100,000 years ago, to an early modern human, the point wasn't to live, but to uplift - stories, songs, aid, games, they loved to further each other's creations and invent their own, which created a feedback loop rapid cultural evolution! and also for the next 50,000 years, for whatever reason (maybe it was attractive?), necks got longer in the final step needed for current speech (and choking) capabilities

~50,000 years ago, early modern humans finally successfully expanded from africa (after repeated failed attempts), mysteriously correlating with the extinction of neanderthals (40,000 years ago) and denisovans (25,000 years ago), but only after much interbreeding with them - they weren't competition, they were neighbours! maybe they sometimes fought, maybe they sometimes allied, consider all that's happened in the past thousand years and remember how long they coexisted for

in this period, to be human was to find new ways of life in a new area, in new conditions, alongside new neighbours like other humans and dogs (that's right! dogs show up sometime in this period!) - and also to know you were hot stuff, because all that interbreeding must've happened for a reason after all (i bet it was the long necks, excellent singing voices, and devotion to community - i wonder whether the weird skulls were usually considered a drawback or attractive?)

~25,000 years ago, only homo sapiens remained - to be human was to be a survivor, whatever catastrophes and population bottlenecks had wiped out everyone else was certainly not gonna take you out, you were going to live and remember them

this is unfalsifiable, but im reminded of a recent smbc comic suggesting that all the human-like creatures in our fantasy stories are a result of this long-term coexistence - we're still looking for our cousins, and if we can't find them in this world, we'll make new worlds to find them in

11,700 years ago (a few centuries after 10,000 bce), the ice age ended and we reached the holocene epoch - the climate changed dramatically, and suddenly the paleolithic revolution was possible, humans everywhere developing complex agriculture, domesticating animals and plants, all that cool stuff - now to be human is to be industrious, if you work hard enough today you can rest tomorrow, and while you rest you'll have plenty of time to think about how you can lessen the workload even more

7,000 years ago, millenia after the domestication (region-dependent) of cattle, of cats, of wheat and rice and peas and flax and potatoes and maize, the earliest known city was founded, uruk, in honour of the goddess inanna, aka ishtar, the oldest god we know of, a probable conflation of multiple much older gods who would later inspire aphrodite aka venus

now to be human was to be part of a people, a culture, to have your place in a history of people like you and knowing that elsewhere is countless peoples unlike you

at first uruk was a collection of villages, but by 5,000 years ago it was a full blown city, huge and complicated and with its own class system and military, truly the city remembered in the epic of gilgamesh, venice in the desert, a city that survived for nearly 6,000 years until 700ce

alongside uruk, 5,000 years ago was the start of the "ancient era", containing bronze and iron ages, kicked off by the development of city-states (ancient egypt originates from around this time, due to the formation of the sahara desert pushing people north to the nile, as does the indus valley civilisation), enabling the invention of writing in mesopotamia among so many other things, seeing the development of proto-indo-european culture into societies across europe

now to be human was to live in a society bigger than you can comprehend, a greater society that's existed basically forever and that you cannot imagine failing to outlive you, with a place in it for you and your children and your children's children, whether they be farming or weaving or sailing or horseriding or accountants - or to live through that which collapses your society, droughts, famines, wars and invasions and sieges, the trojan war, the late bronze age collapse leading to the greek dark ages, the roman kingdom becoming the roman republic becoming the roman empire and reaching the brink of total collapse

an interesting note: 2,500 years ago, celts settle across western and central europe - the gauls, the celtiberians and gallaeci, the britons picts and gaels, the boii, and the galatians, though a lot of the history and culture has been lost and forgotten (we don't even know where the celts originate!) - also the current mathematical method (axiomatic reasoning) was developed by euclid around this time, though it was applied... loosely, to say the least

1,500 years ago, we enter the classical antiquity era, with the beginning of true records of history, the early muslim "conquests" (conquest is too violent a word really, i don't know enough to give too much detail though, im glossing over a lot here) leading to the most advanced civilisations in all of history with the islamic golden age, the maya civilisation forming, huge geopolitical shifts in africa, the roman empire collapsing and leaving behind vast regions of chaos, the beginnings of france, the holy roman empire that defines the history of central europe and still lives on today through the catholic church, the anglo-saxon settlement of britain taking over from the celts somehow (no one's sure what happened there, one century the romano-british kingdoms existed, the next it was the anglo-saxon heptarchy??), the han dynasty of china, the gupta kingdom of india, the echaemenid empire of west asia

now to be human was to know your past, a written history of countless lives each as big as your own, but also to witness and record (and lose all records of) vast world-shaping events creating the nations we know today - to think big thoughts that create mathematics we still use, incredible architecture much of which still survives, to create wonders and wonder at what might come next (and so much has come to pass - i wonder if their expectations have been surpassed?)

and finally, skipping a... very complicated and depressing millenium that i did write about but i was just angrily ranting by the end, we get to:

now

now we live in a world where just a blink ago whole new kinds of nationalism were being invented, the world teetered on the edge of collapse and we still feel that constant all-pervading sense of impending doom, and suddenly we have been thrust into a new form of international community - no longer one built by strangers and the ruling class, but one where a frenchman can send nudes to a brazillian while talking to an australian on the phone

we see the threads of an unbelievably dense web in front of us, a fractal form where the more you zoom in, the more complicated it becomes, and we find new friendships, new communities, new games and art forms and arguments and rivalries and whole lives in that web connecting us all

that web is a superculture, an external intelligence we've watched being born for thousands of years, a superstructure built out of billions of humans

now to be human is twofold:

to know that the world is ending, and see the shadow of that end in every bit of news

to be a particle of culture, a single astronomical body in a galaxy that will spin on with us or without us

and that tension, that simultaneous sense of no tomorrow and eternity, of a world too small to live and a world too big to ever die, of wanting to survive but knowing the world is too big for you, is everpresent and it hurts

and the defining question of the present moment is: what is a human? but not in the sense we've been discussing, but in the sense of "who gets to be human"? who gets rights, and who gets exploited?

we've been asking this question for a long time, and i hope the answer turns out to be a good one

#trivia #writing #this was. longer than i expected it to be #i think i was writing nonstop for like two hours oops #iiim gonna take a moment to breathe i think #now that today's thoughts are out of my head and online ready for no one to read them

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