- Flow of history of how humans evolved could be divided into 4 parts.
We denote a species by
We were not the only homo species on this planet.
The evolution from ape-like body to present-day "human" was not linear. There was a period in history when six different home species existed at the same time on Earth.
We jumped from being in the middle of the food chain to being on the top. Our growth was not gradual. The rate at which we rose, other species failed to do so. Example, a lion evolved to hunt and eat but a deer evolved to run well too. When we rose, it was unnatural. We are still very unsecure about our position at the top. Partly a reason why we keep asserting our dominance on other beings.
Sapiens moved from Africa to Eurasia. (the place where Neanderthals lived) Sapiens probably had sex with Neanderthals, which explains the small percentage of DNA of Neanderthals found in present-day Sapiens. This is The Interbreeder Theory. We have an alternative, The Replacement Theory which suggests that Sapiens, by their power, drove Neanderthals and alike to extinction.
My personal opinion is that the fact that Sapiens kept migrating away from Africa is a reason why Africa is poor currently. We should learn from this and keep building in India, for India.
Sapiens could advance over the years because we have the ability to gossip; we have the ability to build abstractions (gods/countries/human rights/corporations) while other organisms could never surpass the phase of basic communication.
Our present day behaviour still shares similarities with the behaviour of hunter-gatherers.
Chimpanzees practice collective fatherhood. Each female has sex with different kinds of male chimpanzees when she is pregnant. In this way, she aims to give her child the qualities of all different males. It is never clear who is the father of whom. So all fathers treat their kids with equal love. Refer Ancient Commune Theory. People who propose this thought argue that divorces in the modern-day are an output of the modern tendency to keep families nuclear and that humans were somewhat communal like this. So it is not in our "biological software" to stay nuclear. People who think otherwise argue that although humans were communal in the past, they had inner weak ties and ended up loving each other in disproportionate forms.
Dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo Sapiens.
The human collective knows far more today than our ancestors ever did. But at an individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgable and skillful people in history.
Most scholars agree that animistic beliefs were common amongst foragers.
Sungir children are among the best pieces of evidence that 30,000 years ago, Sapiens could invent sociopolitical codes that went far beyond the dictates of our DNA and behavior patterns.
Sapiens are in a sense serial killers too. We drove a variety of species to extinction, especially in Australia and America. Some historians try to put all the blame of extinction onto climate change but the author argues that climate change is a constant flux and if Sapiens had not migrated enough the way they did, the extinction would not have happened.
We went from being hunter-gatherers to farmers. We had a very broad variety of food to eat from. But we have to come down to consuming a few kinds of cereal. We think we domesticate wheat but in reality, wheat has domesticated us. We kept doing this because we felt this will make our lives easier but there is an argument that it has not. It made the life of a farmer's daughter pretty hard, for instance, who had to die of starvation because the rain was not optimal for one season. There is some tell-tale evidence that the progress of agriculture was motivated by divine and cultural ideologies. In this pursuit of excellence, we ended up domesticating animals too which were worst impacted by this revolution. These animals lost free will, had life spans as per what their masters felt optimal, and were often separated from their mothers as soon as they were born.
Farmers began to decrease their mobility. They started building small houses near the lands they cultivated. They started worrying about the future too. Would it rain this year? Do we have enough irrigation sources? The mental space kept becoming miserable if it is to be compared with a life of a forager who was of the opinion that he could not influence the future. A majority of the population kept becoming peasants. While a handful were kings, priests, soldiers, writers - the ones that have been adding value to history. As we kept growing, disputes came into the picture. They needed to be resolved to maintain an imagined order in society. People of influence started coming up with rulebooks of how justice should work. Enforcement of these laws required people to believe in social constructs. People of influence started devising the concepts of God and all rulebooks were justified in name of God. This imaginary order is fragile. It needs the constant support of people to believe in it. This order is so deeply embedded into our lives that moving away from it requires us to build alternative imaginary orders which just defeats the purpose of doing away with the orders.