In the last blog we have seen how we lived our life as scavengers for most of our time in the known history. In this blog we will see how we upgraded from not so significant animal to the most significant one. It really makes me happy and sad at the same time. Because this growth has made us enjoy the joyness of our intellectual curiosity at the same time, it has been creating so much misery for a lot of others on this planet.

Cognitive Revolution

This is the most interesting chapter for me. It introduces one bizarre yet very common feature of our species as the key reason for our success.

Until about 150 thousand years ago, there was no significant difference between us and other human or animal species. But from 150 thousand to 70 thousand years ago, some unique change occurred in our species that made us more powerful than all other humans and animal species.

During these 60 thousand years, we developed new ways of thinking and communication. The author calls this the Cognitive Revolution. The idea of linking this cognitive revolution to the success of Homo sapiens completely blew my mind.

During this period, there may have been a random genetic mutation in Homo sapiens that caused us to think and communicate differently. Why only Homo sapiens and not other human species? We don’t have a clear answer. It could simply have been an evolutionary lottery. This mutation caused several changes in our behavior.

Language

First, we started using a more complex set of sounds to communicate complex information with one another. This enabled us to coordinate and live in groups of up to 100–150 people.

But this ability alone is not unique to us. A monkey can communicate about a lion approaching and tell its group where food is located. Even our close relatives, chimpanzees, have hierarchical societies with alpha males and followers. So this is not the only reason we outlived all of them.

Gossip

The second factor is our ability to gossip about the people in our group. Yes, today we often say that gossiping is bad and should be avoided at all costs. But some scholars believe it was one of the reasons for Homo sapiens’ success.

Gossip allowed us to share information about who could be trusted and who couldn’t, and to choose who should lead the group. This enabled coordination among 100–150 people for survival.

Humans needed this because reproduction and raising a human baby is a complex process and extremely difficult to do individually. However, even chimpanzees show similar behavior. Scholars say that chimpanzees have complex social structures where they gossip about group members to stay united. So again, this alone does not fully explain our success.

Imagined Reality

The third and focal point of the story is our ability to imagine unreal things.

Yes, you heard that correctly. What we call madness is closely related to what differentiates us from other human and animal species. The only difference between madness and imagined reality is how many people believe in it. When only a few people believe in something unreal, we call them mad. But when the majority believe in it, we call those who don’t believe in it mad.

Gods, myths, legends, religions, caste, countries, companies, capitalism, money, communism, and many more things exist only in our imagined world.

These imagined realities enabled us to cooperate in large numbers. How does this give us an advantage? If you ask thousands of people to fight a neighboring country for no reason, no one will do it. But introduce the idea of God and tell them that the neighboring country is disrespecting that God—or even just introduce the concept of a nation and say that neighbors are invading its borders—and suddenly a huge number of people will unite for this common cause.

This is the real turning point. Once we started believing in imagined realities, we were able to come together in large numbers for them.

As another example, take famous brands like BMW, Google, Apple, or Louis Vuitton. These are not natural phenomena; they exist only in our imagined world. If the people who believe in these things disappear, then these brands will also cease to exist.

Because of this ability, we were able to overcome the usual constraints of genetic evolution. If we had to genetically evolve to believe in capitalism, socialism, communism, human rights, and similar ideologies, how many millions of years would that take—or would it even be possible?

But we shouldn’t become overconfident. We are still constrained by our genetic capabilities and are not very different from our close relatives, chimpanzees. Our advantage is that we can move from capitalism to communism, from slavery to freedom, and from religious to atheist—sometimes almost overnight—because all these ideas exist only in the imagined world.

But we should never underestimate the power of this capability.

My View

If one random mutation is all it takes to go from an animal of no significance to the most significant animal on the planet, then what’s stopping us—or any other animal—from having another such mutation?

Throughout history, we have caused immense misery to other animals, other humans, and even the entire ecology. If we accept this reality, what can we do to avoid similar miseries in the future?

If a single planet can contain so much drama, why are we still not seriously considering other forms of life in the universe? We are both the subjects of this story and those being subjected to it.

Does this make things more complicated?
Who are we, exactly?

This is just an overview of how we went from an animal of no significance to the most significant animal on the planet. When we go deeper into these topics, there are enormous details in every aspect of this blog.

In the upcoming blogs, we will explore how we lived and how we changed the course of life on this planet. This will be a roller-coaster ride through the history of humankind.