Ancestral Ways of Knowing

How did we used to know things?

Why We Need to Know

Despite scarce evidence, many people speculate about what human life was like before recorded history. Archaeologists study bones and fragments of human worlds that came before. Anthropologists investigate groups, like villages or early civilizations. Geneticists examine DNA to understand earlier phenotypes. Neuroscientists more recently started estimating how our brains evolved. Evolutionary biologists think about how we might have been influenced by natural selection. It’s even become commonplace for regular people to discuss how we may have transitioned from nomadic hunter-gatherers to farmers, to city-dwellers. 

Curiosity about who we were is natural, and a lack of evidence should not preclude us from knowing or understanding who we were. To understand who we are and where we are headed, we need to know who we were. Especially now, when the world is crumbling all around us. The metacrisis, overshoot, climatic destruction, and resource depletion converge to put an end to life as we know it. If any of the prophesied ends arrive, what are we to do as a species to endure this future? What are we capable of and what are our limitations? Can we survive the loss of systems we designed that never existed before us? Can we return to a more natural and less industrialized version of life on Earth? Was modernity inevitable? Who were we before? These questions are essential to navigating the future and deserve consideration from every possible viewpoint. The 10,000-year problem is mine.

The Evidence Problem

It has been said that everything we know about human prehistory comes from a pile of bones that fits on a small table. But others have claimed this to be inaccurate. Though the direct evidence is slight, the story of who we were is only partially known. When we think about the changes facing humans between 12,000 and 5,000 years ago, there are few certainties. We believe much of Earth was covered in ice, and multiple lines of evidence support this. This leads many to claim humans must have lived primarily in caves. The proverbial cavemen and women are thought to have been adapted to cold and terribly uncomfortable in the northern latitudes, like present-day Europe. But how many caves are there on Earth? How many humans were there? Is it possible that everyone couldn’t survive in built houses? During the same time, and in the same glaciated areas, it is also commonly believed that humans drove most large mammals to extinction. Our appetites and hunting prowess led us to kill everything off. Presumably returning to our caves to dine. 

But what if this wasn’t true? And what about the rest of the Earth, where we have found little to no evidence of human habitation? What about Africa, the cradle of humanity from which all humans present 10,000 years ago derived? What about all the other bones that are buried somewhere out of reach and not easily preserved in caves? Underwater, what used to be tied up in glaciers? Would modern scientists draw such confident inferences from such a limited pool of evidence? To what degree, I ask, have our conclusions about who we were influenced by a handful of investigators and an even smaller number of bones?

Permission to Speculate

Speculation and science are two different things. One cannot exist without evidence and experimentation. And while some forms of science don’t require well-designed experimentation, we ordinarily require a high bar before we call conclusions facts. However, I am a firm believer in multiple (non-scientific) paths to knowing. How many experiments did Einstein do? Many ideas come from thinking alone, do they not? Did humans know nothing before the scientific revolution? Of course not. Playing with ideas, speculating about what could be based on what is understood, and practicing trial-and-error helped us survive for tens of thousands of years. Our brains do not require science to work. Speculation is playing with knowledge, combining reason and our sensory neurology, and is at least as important as science. One of the unfortunate artifacts of modernity is our insistence that knowledge be arrived at in exactly one way. To understand our ancestors, we might try thinking like them. 

I argue that speculation is a valuable tool and employ it here. But speculation is not simply stating opinion. Opinion expresses what we feel in the moment. Speculation integrates what we feel with what we know and what we can reasonably imagine. The 10,000-year problem is an integrated non-scientific method of knowing. Like a return to ancestral thinking — before metacognition made us second-guess every intuition. We thought about solving problems. To improve how we find food. But we also thought because we could. Our brains, evolving in unprecedented ways at unheard of speeds, are fueled by enough food and easier weather. The hardware was outpacing the software. We were thinking because it’s what our bodies did. Using reason and imagination, we converted our reality into stories. Laughed. Loved. And Lived. Unencumbered by the need for experimental design. That’s all I’m doing here: imagining who we were – informed by the resources available to me.

An Evolutionary Argument for Cooperation and Diversity 

Where a lack of evidence seems to limit modern knowledge, I see patterns that explain. A species’ persistence indicates fitness for given environments at the individual and group levels. That a species could persist for over 200,000 years – as indicated by the presence of bones and sediment dating – strongly suggests success. Species deemed unfit in changing environments wouldn’t last as long – and don’t. Natural selection and the related genetic co-conspirators are strong indicators that things are going well.

The relationship among genes, the physical expression of proteins as phenotype, and interactions with dynamic environmental conditions shows us which species work on Earth. Humans, by all indications, are doing quite well. Somehow, we survived an ice age or two. We moved around enough to occupy all sorts of niches. Our genome facilitates generalism and specialization, depending on the day. We design tools, communicate, and remember. Our minds and our DNA cooperate to tell stories about who we are, who we were, and who we can be. And this works for us. But those last two are increasingly important for our survival. 

Our ancestors embraced the diversity inherent in this machinery. Villages were likely characterized by individuality. This intense shift in our minds, thoughts, and ideas facilitated new behaviors and abilities. Some of us just knew, for example, how fish behaved and were thus better able to capture them for food. Some people inherently understood weather and daily changes in temperature or precipitation. And somehow, collectively, we knew that this knowing was important. That our diversity was critical. That cooperation was more than two people interacting to solve a common problem. It was the expression of our DNA – of who we were – directly and fully into the world. We honored the magic of evolution with our presence. Of showing up as who we were. And this benefitted us individually, collectively, and as a species. 

One of the consequences of modernity and the replacement of ancestral knowing with science is our reversal of diversity. The evolution paradox describes how modern humans suppress diversity despite our being specifically evolved to maximize it. What made us human – why we survived for 200,000 years – is our ability to express our genome in myriad ways at multiple levels of organization. To deny this capacity is more than irresponsible – it is dangerous. Diversity reduces competition, enhances the suitability of niches, and leads to more diversity. Fish rear fry in their mouths without eating. Flight opens the skies to resources and the dispersal of multiple animals separately. Bacteria derive the capacity to metabolize poisons. Life wants to live in as many ways as possible. Why would we be any different?

Perhaps the greatest expression of our evolution is the movement away from competition toward cooperation. What makes humans different from other primates is our exceptional ability to work together. In the finest example of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, we, like social insects, have changed how a species can live on Earth. Cooperation is why we survived ice ages. It’s how we learned to eat large mammals. It’s how we figured out how to inherit knowledge. It’s how we shifted the end of life and certainty of death toward immortality. Truly, cooperation, when integrated with the unprecedented expansion of our nervous system, allows us to exist across the expanse of time. To understand our ancestors and speculate about our future. And to ensure that successive generations don’t have to start over. It’s no wonder the period of time between 10 and 5,000 years ago is characterized by such a massive amount of change. 

But don’t take my word for it. Big questions require bigger pools of thought, and despite the prevalence of ‘primitive savages’ beliefs, many modern thinkers have reached similar conclusions to mine. Neanderthals, once thought of as brainless oafs, are now thought to have produced art far earlier than Homo sapiens. Humans and other hominid species interbred. Indigenous communities were more egalitarian and somehow prospered without hierarchical suppression or patriarchy. How did we live for 98.5% of our existence? Why did we think so poorly of ourselves to tell stories about how primitive we were? Who were we for most of the past 5,000 years to not consider a better past for ourselves? For the majority of modernity, a certain type of European man dictated what we believed. Modern humans were brainwashed into believing it. I don’t think our ancestors could comprehend how this is even possible. 

A glimpse at other species that have persisted through time reveals some interesting information. Rather than compete in a ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ style arena, we see a picture of diversity resulting from encroachment on one another. Rather than fight or compete for limited resources, as animals and plants spread across the globe, we tapped into our DNA to facilitate change and differentiation. Speciation results from resource limitations and sees individuals adapted to new resource use reproduce and evolve.  This beautiful dance between our DNA, sexual reproduction, and adaptation across generations IS life. It is who we are and what we do. That a story about singular victories by the strongest or largest even exists is absurd.

A Wrong Turn

And we see this pattern repeat after natural disasters press a proverbial reset button. After the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, animals regrouped, and mammals arose, better adapted to the fresh landscape. After ice ages and fire reduce the number of species present in an area, periods of rapid speciation occur. The machine that fuels life on Earth is not one of reduction but of exponential extension. Yes, all types of interactions occur across all lifeforms, but cooperation is the one best suited for natural selection. To our DNA. To the system of change inside which all of this developed. 

Just as a single bacterium does not single-handedly destroy all other single-celled organisms, humans did not dominate life. Only recently have we started that process. Evidence supporting my hypothesis includes the rise of animal extinctions far beyond normal rates. There is something wrong, and all signs point to human activity. Somewhere along the way, something happened to cause these perturbations. Decisions were made. 

It is almost as if Modernity went in the wrong direction. Humans seemed to abandon the mechanisms and characteristics that helped us persist and succeed. I can’t imagine any natural scenario within which the sorts of evolutionary conditions exist like we have today. To go against our very nature makes no sense. It does not stand up to reason. To conclude that a species would evolve toward homogeneity and individuality is impossible, given all that we think we know. By any means knowable, it is impossible that we would have so dramatically opposed the preceding 200,000 years. It is almost as if it were designed by some other force besides nature. Perhaps it was designed by man himself.