Imagine Life With No Money
no more birkin bags!!
We don’t know why the Cognitive Revolution happened. We do know the implications. It’s hard to understand at first how the ability to communicate about the intangible and fictitious sides of life led to a mass extinction of plants and animals.
To understand, we need to look at our own lives. What are fictions we believe today:
Politics & Nations
Business
Family Values
Religion
Money
Can you even begin to imagine life today without any of these? These are all shared fictions that help us cooperate. They allow us to establish trust with millions of people, instead of a few dozen around us. When we exchange goods or services for money, we don’t question whether or not we trust the other person.
If they pay with money… we trust it! That’s what makes it possible for us to do business with strangers. We have a shared belief in the value of money and the value of the nation.
70,000 years ago, Sapiens bands around the world had different fictions they believed. The important part wasn’t WHAT they believed. The important part is that many of them believed it. This idea will change later with the introduction of widespread religion.
Sapiens used their strength in numbers to kill off all other human species, like homo-erectus, homo-neanderthals, homo-denisovans and more. We either hunted all the food sources on their land until they starved or killed them in battle. We also hunted 100 of the world’s 200 large mammals to extinction during this period.
It’s crucial to note that our ancestors never knew they did these awful things. There was minimal interaction between Sapiens bands. Each group’s entire existence and understanding of the world was limited to where they physically walked to. They had no way to know they caused entire extinctions. If they did, would they have cared? Maybe. There’s no way to know the answer to that.
Tomorrow, we begin our deep dive into the Agricultural Revolution. How did it start? Was it a good thing? What did life actually look like back then?
Question of The Day
How do you think about our hunter-gatherer ancestors? Any differently now than last week?
Your Biggest Fan,
Noah “BigNerd” Sochaczevski