How changing our environments may have changed us. I started this project by asking how humans may have changed over the past 10,000 years, but satisfying answers proved elusive. Partly because, to know how we changed, we would have to know who we were before to compare with who we…
Tag: prehistory
Who We Used to Be
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…
Uncategorized
Read more
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…
Uncategorized
Read more
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…
Uncategorized
Read more
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…