FIRE and Milking titties

It’s some time between 1 and 2 million years ago, you’re a member of the genus Homo, you’re sitting in a cave at night with other members of your tribe trying to keep each other warm with your body heat while there’s a thunderstorm outside. As you curl up in what could be described as a survival orgy ball, you hear loud lightning outside and you see some strong light emitting from near the entry of the cave. You, being one of the few who developed the ability to be curious and fearless, go to check it out. It’s a big ball of light that you assume has been sent by the gods or whatever you believe controls the universe at this point. As you get closer to it, you notice that you no longer feel the cold. It’s pleasantly warm. When you go to pick it up, you feel an extreme pain. You have to conserve it, so you choose a branch that’s only half-lit, and you take it back to the cave. Members of the tribe are very suspicious of it, but when you tell them that the gods sent it, in whatever form of primitive language you, guys, have at that time, they trust you more, especially when the warmth coming from the stick feels extremely pleasant, that’s what they need in this cold weather. So you go pick up enough branches to keep you warm for the night, you sleep through the night comfortably without having to touch anyone else, but to your surprise you wake up and the light is gone. So you spend the rest of the day looking for it again, but in vain. Days, weeks, maybe months go by and you can’t get that out of your head, and you remember the sound you heard before seeing it, so you try recreating it next to a tree, you yell, you pray to the gods, but your voice isn’t strong enough, so you try to replicate it with other tools : you pick up two rocks and slam them together next to a tree, you repeat it over and over and you start seeing a small spark. Your excitement makes you hit the rocks harder and harder until you see a small flame rising, and that’s how you learned to control fire, which you thought others how to do, and your tribe never spent a night freezing again, you learned to cook meat so that you don’t spend as much energy digesting it, you got more nutrients from the meat you ate and your frontal lobe grew bigger and bigger, you had more comfort, more energy and time to spend doing other things; hunting, gathering, fucking reproducing (pardon the redundancy) and of course finding answers to questions that have nothing to do with survival, like : how the fire came to be? And what controls the world? And what the fuck do cow udders do if you squeeze them really tight?

As your brain begins to grow and you get smarter with problem solving, you discover and invent new methods to produce food in larger quantities, but the most radical change was turning from a roaming hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a settled down farmer lifestyle, where you’re obliged to stay in the same place throughout the year to tend to your crops and cattle, and slowly the tribe that was only a dozen people became larger and everyone had a part in it; some planted the seeds, others fed the cows and sheep, others made food, and the ones capable of it built shelter.

Letting go of the old lifestyle meant more comfort and assured your food and shelter, which in itself meant more time and energy dedicated to using that large frontal lobe of yours, your “progress” was slow, but it always has been, and slow progress is still progress. When you started interacting with other tribes that had adopted the same lifestyle but had different farms,  you needed to start bartering with them, and with that came the need to learn how to count and keep count so that all sides come out satisfied, so writing was your next invention, and it slowly went from writing down how many bags of wheat you had to writing down ideas and new observations you had so that other people could learn the same information without necessarily experiencing the same experiences, and that information transmission took the speed of “progress” to an exponential level, one’s mind had more ideas than his own, you could have everything a person learned in the span of 40 years in just a handful of papers, without the need to live that many years, and with each generation the experiences accumulated, resulting in a specie that had the lifespan of a couple decades and the knowledge of a millennia of experiences, each individual contributing with a small percent to help the generations afterwards. And the exponential growth never stopped, it just kept going. You invented various transportation modes, on land, on water, on air and even in space, endless energy sources, although not all of them were helpful for the planet that birthed you, but the inventions that had the most drastic effects were the modes of communication and information transmission, you went from hand symbols to spoken words to written words, then audio communication and radio transmission came to be and it eventually gave rise to the internet, which housed all information known to mankind, the useful and the useless, the obvious and the obscure, the true and the false, the safe and the harmful. Now it became possible to live a couple decades and have a knowledge age of 3000 years.

Of course knowledge has become so abundant now that you can keep learning until you die of exhaustion, but human nature hasn’t changed, the basic instinct that rejected any outsider because the food available wasn’t enough for one more person, didn’t dissipate just because there’s enough food in the world to eradicate hunger forever everywhere, the basic instinct of showing off to impress a mate or intimidate potential rivals persisted in us even if the need for it is no more. We have walked such a long way, and got so high in relation to other creatures on the progress ladder, but we haven’t been able to overcome our nature; having a simple misunderstanding lead to major conflicts that would cause thousands of undeserving deaths.

Youssef Toumi