Were Our Ancestors Savages?
Ch.3 - A day in the life of Adam and Eve
It’s easy to judge our ancestors as barbaric. But what if I told you they were smarter back then than we are now?
Were our ancestors savages? I heard they killed babies.
Maybe. Again, each band of humans had different guiding values, principles and rules. That said, it is commonly believed that certain groups would leave slow members behind to die, and kill babies deemed underdeveloped. But we need to remember, morality is culture-specific.
We live today (mostly) far-removed from risk of death. When was the last time you made a decision based on your chances of survival? Of course it seems cruel today to kill your uncle because he’s slow. But what if being slower meant everyone’s chances of dying of starvation increased? Much harder situation now.
Foraging Sapiens women had sex with many men while pregnant so the kid would inherit all their greatest traits. Were they dumb?!
Before the invention of DNA tests, was it obvious that a woman’s egg is fertilized by a single sperm?
Before modern science, it was very hard to disprove common explanations. Consider how often you believe things just because you hear it repeated a bunch of times. As a kid, everything you believed was simply what you were told repeatedly. As we get older, we correct these misconceptions by going to school, asking experts or searching online.
Now imagine you had no better source of information to reference. How could you know that indeed chewing gum does not stay in your stomach for 10 years? There was no scientific method to produce hypotheses. There was no time to study anything that didn’t obviously help survival. It was hard to disprove things because it was hard to make better explanations.
These early versions of ourselves were far from dumb. In fact, “the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her descendants… There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging” (Sapiens, 55).
Today, as a species, we’re smarter. As individuals, we’re dumber.
What is the true ancient human diet that we evolved for?
This question assumes that all 8 million or so humans on earth 30,000 years ago had the same diet. In fact, each group was about as different as they were similar. That is what makes us human.
The Cognitive Revolution gave us the ability to create and believe in fictions. These fictions meant that each group of humans had different ways of life despite having the same DNA. An obvious modern example is your kosher neighbor. An orthodox Jew doesn’t eat shellfish, or pig or any bottom feeders. It’s not because their DNA is different, it’s because their beliefs are different.
The same way people today have different diets based on geography, so too did our ancestors. Although, what we do know is that generally, they had more varied diets than today. Their diet was determined by the climate, the season, the weather and so much more. The guiding principle to their diet was - “what can I forage or hunt today?”
We know little of any dietary restrictions in Sapiens bands similar to kashrut, halal, veganism, keto etc. (That is not evidence it didn’t exist, it’s just a lack of evidence either way). It’s hard to believe that nomadic people regularly at risk of starvation would have specialized diets. But it’s not impossible. The power of belief is incredible.
Question of The Day
What’s something untrue that you heard as a kid and believed for way too long?
Your Friend,
Noah “BigNerd” Sochaczevski
PS. Found this comic strip online. I know it’s lame but it made me laugh :)
