MINDLESS MUSINGS

We’ll skip the primordial soup and jump ahead a few eons. I reckon we can bypass the evolution stage, and the debate for that matter. Let’s kick-off with the original human beings wandering the landscape looking for and trying not to become food. Shit! Can you imagine the treacherous learning curve for those people? Especially before they got together and figured out how to communicate.

I imagine the first few generations didn’t last too long at all. We always hear about the gazillion to one chance that life exists at all; but the odds that an unskilled and unarmed human could survive long enough to find a mate and then pop out a munchkin must be just as astronomical!

Despite constant peril somehow our ancestors managed to produce enough offspring to launch a bona fide species. After countless bouts of fatal trial and error, combined with a capacity to pass information on to the next hapless human test subject, they managed to compile enough knowledge to shift the odds of survival a little more onto the positive side.

These primitive pioneers managed to survive thanks to a combination of ingenuity and communication (opposable thumbs probably helped too). This relatively puny creature with practically no natural weaponry, no great speed, no flight or great climbing ability, no feathers or fur, practically no hair (it’s as if they were not meant to make it!), no innate camouflage…holy fuck! It truly is miraculous!

They endured and they learned. Eat this, don’t eat that. Stay well clear of those; if you hear this you better move your ass! They created tools and weapons. They fabricated clothing to keep warm. And fire! You little beauty! Did they make it or discover it? Google that, we haven’t got time.

At this small tribal stage, I surmise that things were pretty egalitarian. No place for fat cats in this environment. Working together was the only way to survive. A group with no cohesion or too much dead weight would have slim to no chance of making it. There wouldn’t have been much tolerance for selfishness or greed.

Now between tribes…I can see trouble brewing there. Like most trouble we humans seem to generate, it arises from too many of us. As we got better assimilated to the environment, we went from mere survival to flourishing of a sort.

While hardly a population explosion, our numbers increased markedly. A nomadic tribe could only function up to a certain amount of people; the logistics just weren’t suited for mass procreation. Thus, it meant that the number of tribes, rather than the tribes themselves began to increase.

While a few adventurous mobs would venture further into the unknown, a lot wouldn’t, and things started to get a bit crowded. I’m not talking Mumbai or Shanghai; hell, folks from Mogo would feel lonely in this setting!

Be that as it may tribes would have been crossing paths more often after a millennium or two. Some would be strangers which means distrust and fear; others might be familiar, lessening suspicion, but they were human after all. The grass is always greener as they say…Envy breeds anger and anger breeds…

I highly doubt these vulnerable groups would risk casualties through open warfare. Sneaky shit would definitely be on the cards though. This larceny might even escalate to abduction, which created hostility and ended in violence. As I said, they were human after all, and we much too often find a way to bring about the exact things we were trying to avoid.

So this went on for a few million years and somewhere along the way one of those clever souls figured out the connection between the edible plants and seeds. Hello! We can actually ensure that there are plenty of the good plants. Things are looking up…