Who are we, where did we come from, and where are we going?

It’s a com­plex, three part ques­tion that we may never be able to fully answer. We do, how­ever, get closer every day. We build things. We revise them, and build them bet­ter. We make art to express our­selves, and wage war to defend our­selves. The world today is grow­ing rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent than the world of the ancients — and even the world of our Amer­i­can pio­neers. If one were to look at the charts and graphs sci­en­tists have devel­oped to demon­strate our ever increas­ing tech­no­log­i­cal prowess, they may find them­selves star­tled and afraid. The charts are climb­ing through the roof, shift­ing towards an expo­nen­tial trend of growth. Some argue that the Dar­win­ian mode of genetic evo­lu­tion is being replaced by a new form of evo­lu­tion dubbed Memetic Evo­lu­tion. Memes are human habits –art, music, lit­er­a­ture, and all other facets of our cul­ture. And our memes, it seems, are copy­ing them­selves at an alarm­ing rate.

The time it takes to com­mu­ni­cate a thought from one human being to another is shrink­ing expo­nen­tially. The activ­i­ties of writ­ing let­ters and send­ing telegrams have been replaced by the newer, faster meth­ods of email and text mes­sag­ing. What took a mat­ter of weeks if not months a hun­dred years ago now takes a mat­ter of min­utes if not sec­onds. If one were to extrap­o­late that trend of growth into the future, surely in the next hun­dred years it seems that we may become able to com­mu­ni­cate instan­ta­neously, even telepathically.

Yet, in this human frenzy of growth and explo­ration, we have to occa­sion­ally stop and smell the roses. How did we get here in the first place? Why were humans blessed with the gift of knowl­edge, and the poor chim­panzee left to poke around in the dirt?

Granted, some have argued that chim­panzees and ele­phants exhibit traits of self aware­ness and con­scious­ness. This was deter­mined by a mir­ror test, in which a mark­ing was made on the animal’s face, and con­se­quently shown its own reflec­tion. If the ani­mal imme­di­ately began groom­ing the mark­ing, sci­en­tists decided that it must be aware of itself. Yet are chim­panzees aware that humans are supe­rior to them as a species? Do they regard us as we may regard aliens or reli­gious fig­ures, as supreme beings? “Oh dang, a human is com­ing, I bet­ter act busy, and make it look like I’m doing some­thing impor­tant.” Regard­less of their inner per­cep­tions, all ani­mals except humans lack the men­tal syn­tax required for a com­plex lin­gual sys­tem. We are able to com­mu­ni­cate knowl­edge, infor­ma­tion, thoughts, feel­ings, and emo­tions to one another through our lan­guages. Yet, how did we get this way? Why are we the cho­sen ones, blessed with the power to pon­der life, time, space and God? Why are we the cursed ones, forced to ques­tion our own exis­tence and pur­pose on this planet, in this universe?

Our ances­tors first began mak­ing music and art some 40,000 years ago. Was this a result of some divine entity impart­ing its wis­dom into our souls? Prob­a­bly not. Most researchers have come to agree that such a change took place over thou­sands if not hun­dreds of thou­sands of years worth of genetic muta­tions. Was it the fact that our brains grew to be much larger than our pre­de­ces­sors? That was also not the case. Nean­derthals had a sim­i­lar sized brain as the Cro Magnon man, yet dis­played very lit­tle cul­ture. The Cro Magnon man per­formed many rit­u­als when one of their loved ones died. They places thou­sands of beads into the grave, and spent a large amount of time prepar­ing the cer­e­mony. Nean­derthals, on the other hand, sim­ply chucked the dead body into a pit. It seems that they had much less regard and under­stand­ing of life in this regard. They did not exhibit any signs of art, music, or any cul­ture for that mat­ter com­pared to the Cro Magnon man.

So then, what was it that set us apart? Why did we ascend to a higher state of exis­tence com­pared to our ani­mal neigh­bors? Per­haps it was not the actual size of our brains, but the wiring that gave us knowl­edge. Hunt­ing was prob­a­bly the pri­mary rea­son we invented tools and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We designed, built, and redesigned stone tools until they gave us effec­tive results. Then, we used meth­ods of com­mu­ni­ca­tion to impart this knowl­edge to our descen­dants. Then, while hunt­ing, we devel­oped sig­nals and signs to aid in the kill. Thus, we began to devise hunt­ing plans, and tac­tics. We began to work together. This would have even­tu­ally become lan­guage as we know it, when our first vocal­iza­tions could be heard echo­ing through­out the ancient land­scape. A ver­bal lan­guage would have greatly sped up the com­mu­ni­ca­tion process. That would have in turn allowed for more effi­cient hunt­ing and gath­er­ing prac­tices, as more knowl­edge would have been con­veyed in a shorter amount of time. This would have resulted in more free time, which would have allowed hob­bies like bead mak­ing and art to become commonplace.

Thus, the birth of cul­ture. Bead mak­ing could have led to a value sys­tem, where beads were traded for goods and ser­vices. As time went on, our ances­tors may have found gold and sil­ver, and traded those. Money is born. The more money an indi­vid­ual had, the more power was asso­ci­ated with that per­son. Now we start get­ting into wars to gain more power, more con­trol over land and hunt­ing areas. Peo­ple start to make more and more art and music so that they can for­get about the wars, and the pain of lost loved ones. They may have found that while they were mak­ing music or art that time seemed to slow down, and they were able to con­nect with some hid­den force that felt eter­nal, and more real than real­ity itself. For in those fleet­ing moments of cre­ativ­ity, they were becom­ing eter­nal by cre­at­ing some­thing that would live on long after they were gone. These ances­tors of ours could con­nect with one another in ways the phys­i­cal world could not have allowed them to in the past. Unbe­knownst to them, they were build­ing the frame­work of what would some­day become soci­ety itself — a net­work of thought and culture.

Today, this net­work is more present than ever, and grow­ing rapidly. Even though bio­log­i­cally we may be the same as we were some 50,000 years ago, our minds have expanded out into the uni­verse, and deep into our own souls. As a race, we have become aware of our own lim­i­ta­tions — time, space, and our­selves. And as we tire­lessly work to break through these bound­aries, we may not real­ize how sim­i­lar the act of build­ing a space shut­tle is to build­ing a stone axe. They are both tools we use to advance our­selves, and now more than ever, it feels as though we are on the verge of another men­tal big bang. Just as our ances­tors broke through the bar­rier sep­a­rat­ing action from speech, we may be on the verge of break­ing through the bar­rier that sep­a­rated our bod­ies from our souls. For some­day soon, we may truly get the chance to meet our true selves and shake our own hands. Some­day soon, we may decide not to be human, or any­thing, at all.