We Might As Well Be Kind

The odds of history being in our favour are unknown

Photo by Allan Henderson

I recently wrote about our common idealisation of the past. While I wasn’t casting my thoughts as far back as prehistory, I do think the idealisation goes that far.

Mammoth-Free Paleo-Diets

For example, paleo-diets rightly focus on the nutritional diversity of the foods that hunter-gatherers ate, but swiftly brush over the actual hunting and gathering. The moment you don’t exert yourself physically to hunt a mammoth, the nutritional impact of eating a mammoth changes. However, there is a mystique about going back to find our origin, that pristine state in our evolution when all was good and virtuous and uncorrupted. The idea is rooted in almost all of our religions and traditions (Garden of Eden, anyone?), so it is no wonder we hardly hesitate before accepting that backwards is a viable path.

Tribes

As an avid adolescent reader, I remember a novel that took the main characters to study this secluded part of the world where the Neanderthal had somehow managed to survive. The novel argued that it was Sapiens’ cunning nature, our ability to deceive, that had made the difference. Fiction aside, there are several hypotheses as to why both the Neanderthal and the Denisovans perished to give way to us. One of the most…