Lessons From the Stone-Age
Why We Still Embrace the Spirit of Our Ancestors
Around 12.5 thousand years ago, in an area that is now modern Britain, a person sat down and drew a galloping horse on the flat side of a piece of rib bone. Then they seemed to cross it out.
That piece is called the Robin Hood Cave Horse; so-called because it was found in the Robin Hood Cave in Derbyshire England.
You can see in the photograph that there are a bunch of vertical lines going through the horse. These were added after the horse was finished, and the meaning is highly interpretable.
Is this part of the drawing? Maybe the horse is behind some fencing being used to trap it? Maybe the lines represent falling spears? Or maybe the artist didn’t like it and defaced it in an act of frustration.
I love this piece because I find it very relatable, you can imagine the scene…
A girl sitting down to practise some drawing. Her dad coming home from a hunt or trade and saying “hey, that’s really good!” Her feeling frustrated due to being a perfectionist and saying “no it’s not! It’s terrible!” scribbling some lines through it and throwing to the ground. Dad picking it up and placing it in the back of the cave to later be forgotten about when the tribe moved on…
It’s a scene from any modern-day home, and of course who knows exactly what the actual history of the item is, but I draw a lot of comfort from thinking about how we modern humans and stone-age humans were very similar.
We have the same brains as stone-age humans
Evolution takes a very long time
The Stone Age marks a period of prehistory in which humans used primitive stone tools. Lasting roughly 2.5 million years, the Stone Age ended around 5,000 years ago when humans in the Near East began working with metal and making tools & weapons from bronze.
2.5 million years to 5,000 years ago!
That’s a long time! 2,495,000 years. Creatures evolve and go extinct in that time frame, that’s almost halfway back from now to the dinosaurs.
In other words, our brains as humans did a hell of a lot of developing in the stone-age time, we had 2,495,000 years to adapt to our stone age life.
Modern-day? only 5000 years so far (and actually, modern-day the way we know it is only a couple of hundred years!).
Maybe this is one of the reasons so many of us struggle with the trials of modern-day life and long for a far-away cabin in the woods.
Ok, so who the hell cares right? We’re living in the here and now, so why would thinking about how stone-age people lived their lives be of any relevance today?
Well, a while ago now I used to play a mind game whenever I, or others, got particularly stressed, which was to think about how a stone age person might react to that situation. Obviously, we have no way of really knowing, but let's take raising kids for example:
Surely, by now, we should be able to raise kids with relative ease, right? Passing on genes to the next generation is the one thing animals are pretty driven to do; you’d think after 2.5 million years we’d have figured out how to do it without needing to have a mental breakdown every few months (weeks? Days? I don’t know I’m not actually a parent but I’ve heard some horror stories from my loved ones who are).
I wondered how stone age people might have approached this, and then it hit me. Of course! Stone age people lived in close-knit communities. Raising kids was a group effort, mothers didn’t end up feeling like all their personality and autonomy were taken away as there were plenty of people to help with everything. Fathers didn’t end up feeling the pressure of having to provide for their families because everyone in the group contributed to the tribe and looked after each other.
Kinda makes the idea of two people trying to raise kids on their own pretty ridiculous, let alone one person! 2.45+ million years of not having to worry about it like that, and actually it’s pretty recently, like only the past 300 or so years that raising the children has stayed within the immediate family. Really puts it into perspective why we struggle so much to raise kids now.
Thinking about our struggles in that way helped me put a lot of them into perspective, and also not feel quite so bad about being unable to cope. Actually, most people struggle to cope with certain things, and that’s because of our stone age evolved brains.
3 Things We Can Learn From Our Ancestors That Are Both Comforting and Affirming
Egalitarianism
When the shackles of indoctrination are thrown off, most people get pretty frustrated with the lack of equality in the world. Sexism, racism, homophobia, and all the rest do not sit well with us, and from what we can tell, it didn’t sit well with our ancestors either. Well more that maybe they just didn’t consider it.
Here we have some research that suggests that men and women were pretty equal back then.
Sexism came along when agriculture started to become a thing. Suddenly people started to hoard resources, then it became more important to be bigger and stronger to defend your land, ergo men were more useful. Men form alliances with other men and women started to be seen as a resource. Hello, sexism! Not necessary when we moved around in nomadic groups.
We can’t really tell from our ancestor's remains about racism and homophobia, but both of these can trace their roots back more or less to certain religions and colonialism, this probably wasn’t a concern for our ancestors; I mean sure there was probably a load of “tribe A is better than tribe B” but nothing like the systemic racism and homophobia we see today. However, I will take this opportunity to say that I am neither an anthropologist nor a time traveler so who knows? But I doubt it.
So if you feel frustrated about the lack of equality in the world, well that’s probably because humans haven’t really evolved to live that way.
Lesson 1, lack of equality is upsetting because it’s not actually how we evolved to be.
Being Supportive of One Another
We’re finally coming out of all this crap about being mean to each other thank god! All this “emotions are for the weak” bollocks has caused so much damage. If emotions weren’t necessary then we wouldn’t have evolved to have them.
There’s a ton of evidence for ancient humans looking after each other (here, here, and here if you want to read), and humans coming together supportively is a big thing that caused us to become the powerhouse species that we are. I mean look at the cities we’ve built!
Let's talk about tears for a minute. We cry when we’re utterly overwhelmed. Often in sadness, but it’s any emotion really. So incredibly happy that your friends got married? Crying. Unbelievably cute dog? Tears. Too many projects on the go but you need to do the dishes and laundry and all these things are keeping you from achieving your dreams so you’ll never be free? Floods of tears!… Ok maybe that last one is just me, but you get the point.
Tears = Overwhelm.
What if tears are there to show others that you’re too overwhelmed right now to function and you need someone else to come and help you? That makes so much sense, right? Well, turns out that’s actually the leading theory as to why we cry.
So, lesson number 2 is that your emotions are there to be felt and tears are just a call for help. We evolved to ask for help and to give it. When you’re a baby the first thing you do is cry, you ask for help. It’s the most natural human thing to do in the world, embrace it.
Individual Differences are Essential for Our Success
This is my favourite one.
Humans are arguably some of the most adaptable and curious creatures on earth. There are lots of other animals with very high intelligence. Dolphins, Elephants, crows have even been able to solve puzzles quicker than humans can. But the thing that humans really have is an insatiable curiosity, and because there are so many things in the world to be curious about, everyone has their own blend of interests unique to them.
Because we’re so curious, we’re incredibly adaptable. We can problem solve pretty much any issue we come across.
Our curiosity leading to our adaptability is what caused us to end up being the most dominant creature on the planet. We couldn’t have gotten to where we are if stone age humans didn’t embrace their interests.
As we got smarter and better at hunting it freed us up to spend more time enjoying life, and for humans that was satiating curiosity, creating things, and trying to make life easier. And we did those things well, hence why we evolved the way we did.
There was always benefit to come from someone's interests, be it the obvious advances in society such as new tool making, or the traveling storyteller who brought joy and tales of discovery to the various tribes they visited.
The 3rd thing that we can learn from our ancestors is that doing the thing you enjoy WILL be of benefit to society, even if all it does is make people smile, that still makes the world better.
What have we learned?
Well, if our evolution is anything to go by:
- We’re actually pretty egalitarian and, despite what some bigots out there might insist upon, we’re all a lot happier for that.
- Giving and receiving help is a necessary part of our society. Both giving and accepting help make us feel good.
- Follow your interests. Your enjoyment of a craft/hobby will be good for you and others.
My main takeaway from writing this article is to remember that a lot of the things we are fighting for: equality, recognition of emotions, being ok with needing help, and even the following of one's dreams & interests, well there’s a reason those things make us feel good, and it’s because that’s actually how we evolved to be.
