When enough was truly enough. Photo by Meressa Chartrand on Unsplash Early Human Life We know almost nothing about 98% of human existence, but what we do know suggests we were doing something right. For most of our time on Earth, humans lived within planetary boundaries. Our populations were small, our appetites and…
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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…
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We Have It All Wrong
Humans will never outsmart nature The Shift Ten thousand years ago, humans experienced a significant shift. Something – some things – happened that drastically altered our evolutionary path. Many believe that a shift toward lootable wealth, generated by increased proficiency in agriculture, storage of surplus, and larger community size, marked…
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Nature is Our Ally
Why cooperation > competition in diverse ecosystems Photo by Hiroko Yoshii on Unsplash How did patriarchy evolve in the social structure of a primarily cooperative species? I began asking myself questions like this after a couple of archaeological experiences in England and Egypt. I realized we must understand — as well as possible…
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A Meaningful Series of Events
Our Pathway to Modernity Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash Who We Were We can only speculate about human societies 10,000 years ago, inferring from limited evidence that we transitioned from nomadic to sedentary life. As food storage became reliable, settlements grew. Brain development and cultural sophistication followed. The narrative varies — some…
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Yet Somehow We Got Egypt
The Mystery “Our understanding of early human existence comes from a handful of bone fragments that would fit on this table”. This was the answer to a question I didn’t know I needed. Our tour guide, an archaeology PhD with the personality of Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool, verified what I’ve…
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At Best, We’re Bad Scientists
And most of us aren’t even scientists. But we think we are. have a B.S., an M.S., and a PhD. Depending on your position in the ‘street vs book smarts’ debate, I may or may not be smart. Personally, I think degrees are overrated. I also think I’m smart. But…
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Here’s Why Money is Scarce
Don’t give me your abundance bs Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash In 1997 I had a job paying ten dollars an hour, and I was the righest guy I knew. I was 25 years old, had an undergraduate degree, and had worked in a part-time government field position for two years. Minimum…
How Can We Be More Gentle With Ourselves?
Gentleness, precision, and letting go. Pema Chodron, in ‘The Wisdom of No Escape’, shares with us a secret formula for life. I see it now as an almost mathematical equation describing the hidden homeostatic mechanism balancing what it means to be human. It goes a little something like this…. Life…
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Reductionism, Individualism, and the Fall of the Human Species
Fellow humans, your shortsightedness is showing One of the downsides to human evolution is that we’re not very good at seeing things from outside our perspective. Simultaneously, we struggle to live in the moment, spending most of our time worrying about the past or the future. We are in our…