Many areas of human investigations suffered and still suffer from hybris, especially history. 'We live in the best times ever' describes a short-cut towards the gathering of knowledge that inevitably leads to misconceptions, and it seems like the 21st century is especially prone to foster this myth.
What can we learn from history if we assume a beginner's mind towards the mystery of life? What attitudes might change if we don't take for granted that the current society doesn't reflect the most advanced human civilisation that ever stepped on this planet? Can we advance the evolution of mankind if we let go of the cultural arrogance that seems so normal in contemporary times? What do really know about our ancestors?
The name we give our species is 'homo sapiens', and exists as a genetically distinct race for about 60,000 years. We have only little evidence for most of that time, until the invention of written language, which is considered to be the birth of civilisation, about 6000 years ago. I hesitate a bit using these numbers, which indicate quite a lot of certainty about facts reaching that far back, I just consider them as reasonable hypothesis worth of some more scrutiny.
It might feel good to think about ourself as representatives of the smartest band of humans ever lived, the most civilised, somehow the end of linear development towards amazing engineering achievements we witness today, with computers, cars, planes, rockets, satellites, skyscrapers and the lot. Yet this attitude might be much older, just replace our current technology with state of the art achievement known at a given period of time and our ancestors might have fallen for similar misconceptions.
Life, as we understand it nowadays, contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics, one of the essential axioms of modern physics. Okay, I went a bit far here, however, the theory talks mainly about 'systems in isolation' than tend towards entropy (disorderly chaos) without the input of 'external' energy. Although conceptual space (language, scientific theories) allows to state this, and although this idea helped advanced concepts to develop with tangible effects on our perceptual reality, it doesn't necessarily reflect we universe we live in.
It seems to me like the hapless attempt to separate order from chaos. implying that order is 'good' and chaos is 'bad', and that we wonderful human beings can create order of out chaos. Yet chaos and order are already conceptual categories that depend on our perspective, and our ability to factualise our experience. Art often transcended this assumed dichotomy, as does modern science in some areas.
Life means always transformation, as well as movement, and creates order, even without intention. An amoeba needs food and avoid danger, which indicates that even the most 'primitive' forms of life create order out of chaos. The accumulation of carbon in living cells on this planet, which started billions of years ago, provides the basis for our current civilisation, which is addicted to ancient forms of carbon as basis for 'external' energy generation.
Life needs energy in some shape or form. Plant life transforms the thermal energy of our sun into chemical energy, this chemical energy can be consumed by animals, which use this energy to move around much more than plant based life, and humans came up with with symbol systems that transferred the knowledge how to utilise all that chemically bound energy from plants, animals and other dynamic environmental processes for their own survival.
Let's take the question whether an amoeba 'knows' or has awareness for its need for food and the existence of danger in its environments aside for a second. The modern homo sapiens knows about the need for food and about the avoidance of dangers, we consider ourself to be aware of this probably in a different way from the other forms of life on this planet. We are a special species on this planet, much more capable of shaping our environments in ways that serves our needs to keep alive.
Yet although humans can shape the environments to better serve our needs, as a species we might have started just relatively recently do to so. Hunter-gatherer societies have less of an environmental impact than modern man, their survival depended more on applicable knowledge about it than on shaping it to their liking. In some remote places these societies survived until now, indicating that 'civilisation' is a potential for our species, yet not a necessity.
Again, it depends just on the perspective to claim that 'culture' came with civilisation. The genocide of many indigenous societies in order to 'civilise' them has destroyed many cultures. The way 'Australian history' is portrayed offers a good example of the common misconception that the most violent culture is the best, ignoring the fact that transference of knowledge doesn't need highly abstract symbol systems manifested in written language.
As we haven't got a time machine, we can only guess from what remains over time what happened in our ancient past. Yet many artefacts of culture deteriorate extremely fast, most materials to store symbolic information follow the Second Law of Thermodynamics, lose the order imposed by man and transform back into the randomness of chaos. Stone provides a platform to preserve information for thousands of years, yet seems highly impractical from a modern perspective.
In other words, an ancient civilisation 20,000 years ago that would have used similar information storage like we do today, wouldn't have left too many marks that could survive until today. Atlantis, if it ever existed, might simply evade rediscovery by insufficient methods to maintain information that can survive periods of history which most people can't imagine anyway.
One myth of the 'linear' development of human technology describes their preferred tools, from the Stone Age via the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. While humans aren't the only life form on this planet deploying tools, most other species that use tools haven't generalised this principle for all areas of life. Yet even in the stone age humans created artefacts that defy the idea of 'primitive' societies - a lot of 'brain power' has gone into the construction of Stonehenge, and maybe even the Sphinx.
While a spearhead made of stone was exceeded by more clever technology to hunt, it shows already a lot of ingenuity. Unlike the modern approach of 'one size fits all', it combined know-how from different areas. A stone-age spear is composite of a wooden shaft with a stone tip, most likely tied to it to keep it in place. People were already dressed, which means there was knowledge of making clothes from natural materials. Natural fabrics deteriorate much faster than stone and metal, yet even the Neandertals dressed and embellished themselves with jewellery.
So plainly said, if we consider covering up ourselves out of shame and/or need, making ourselves look better by jewellery and mostly having some common yarn and maybe song as an indication of culture humans did so maybe even hundred thousands of years ago. The simple act of cooking accomplishes already some chemical transformation, as does the production of leather, so even our prehistoric relatives deserve to be considered quite smart.
Considering that even Neandertals showed signs of what I happily call culture (tool use, burials and thus most likely language), we cannot surely say how much their use of symbols went. A lot of natural surfaces can easily be scratched by a stick, and all sort chemistry happens when we use fire. Any symbol system not manifested in stone, and older than about 3,000 years would have a hard time surviving. Clay tablets might have been the earliest form of written language, but they could as well just be just remnants of the idea to make information last a very long time.
One most important fact about human nature finds only little consideration, especially in science and likewise often in history, our existence as social being. I find it hard to imagine that being hostile towards other human beings come natural, basing a society on hostility might be just a quite recent development. Independent of the language we use, emotional expressions are universal, and empathy most likely played quite a big role in tribal societies.
We have to literally dig deep to get an impression what happened in our past, and once things get buried for a while, nature starts recycling. Although it seems popular to create history by transporting the mechanism of contemporary society into the past, I don't think it's a legit way to understand our ancestry. If Atlantis existed just 6000 years ago, only stone remnants would have survived.
Our contemporary fondness of 'keeping records' still doesn't come very natural to most humans, and so there's little trustworthy information about earlier cultures. Only relative liberal societies offer an insight of their culture, conservative cultures prescribe official interpretations of their 'values'.
Once we stop seeing contemporary mankind as precipice of evolution, we can start a conscious evolution.
Of course, as its my local police station, sun was shining, and it's a pain in the ass to drive a car along Sydney Road on a friday arvo and find a park, I had my trusty unicycle with me. The copper wanted to make me wrong, and started the usual false argumentation. Danger of cycling without helmets, which I countered with the lack of compulsory helmet laws in Europe. 'You'd better get back then', and I squeezed a grimaced 'Thank you, sir' as reply, took my papers and left.
