the world we live in feels normal ordinary it feels like this is just how humans exist and
always existed if it feels normal to you you're probably not looking deeply enough into things
because almost everything is interesting and magical and crazy if you look into it deeply
enough but it's not never before have we humans lived in a world as sophisticated
and engineered to our needs as today giving us the luxury to forget about ourselves and not
worry about survival so true food shelter security all of this is more or less taken for granted but
we're a special few for more than 99.99 of human history life I often wonder if that's why we have
so many problems with all this all this mental health stuff because life is so cushy you know
we can just sit around and and be comfortable and not many people seem to want to do stuff and just
enjoy things and that's good but some people for some reason can't sit around and do things and
when they do that they feel terrible who knows what's you know going on with the mental health
in terms of how it relates to this but you know like imagine people in times of war and
um before that when they're hunting for their food you know if you if you're sad
and stuff you're obviously just gonna that's you down you know you're not gonna get food
um so maybe in the past you know it was selected natural selection was selecting for people who
um you know just did things and so now we're allowing everyone to survive not allowing it's
not like anyone's allowing nature um that could be why you know everyone's just allowed to they
don't want to sort of work hard or um try and do things it sounds kind of cruel I'm just trying to
like give you some like from previously in history why where was all the mental
health problems you know it's very interesting to think about and I don't think we think about this
enough because if we did maybe there's things we could do to try and simulate I don't know
okay it's not like we can force people to go live like they used to it was a terrible time
I'm just thinking it's completely different and there's no such thing as just one human history
Our Story begins six million years ago when the tribe of hominini split and our relationship with
the Apes ended 2.8 million years ago the genus of homo the first humans emerged we like to think of
ourselves as the only humans but this is far from the truth when we Homo sapiens sapiens came into
existence two hundred thousand years ago there were at least six other human species around
cousins of comparable intelligence and ability which must have been incredibly scary kind of
like living with aliens some of them were very successful Homo erectus for example survived for
two million years ten times longer than modern humans have existed the last of the other humans
disappeared around 10 000 years ago we don't know what caused them to die out modern humans have at
least a few percent of Neanderthal and other human DNA so there was some mixing but certainly not
enough to be a merger between species so we don't know if our cousins went away because they lost
the battle over resources or because of a series of minor genocides either way only we remain
like ice ages and things and we just got lucky
things of humanity 2.8 million years ago early humans used tools but did not make
a lot of progress for nearly 2 million years until they learned to control fire
meant cooking which made food more nutritious which contributed to the development of our brain
it also produced light and warmth which made days longer and Winters less gruesome on top of that
it not only scared Predators away it could also be used for hunting a torched wood or grassland
provided small animals nuts and tubers that were pre-roasted from three hundred thousand years ago
most of the different human species lived in small hunter-gatherer societies they had fire
wooden stone tools planned for the future buried their dead and had cultures of their own but most
importantly they spoke to each other probably in a kind of proto-language less complex than ours
if that's an interesting thing to think about because like language is kind of how we
um decipher thoughts or it's incredible to really think about this you know before language
what were they thinking about what do animals think about and you can kind of touch on this
maybe with uh thinking about you know aphantasia and how some people can't actually have an inner
monologue and some people don't can't visualize things in their head so there are other ways of
going about things but before language it's like well how did they even Express all this
different stuff they probably didn't probably just felt very true andira up here Community
was basically mandatory yeah you were screwed if you were if you were a loner back then introverts
so maybe there's something wrong with all the introverts alive today where all the you know
the mutated ones I like to think about that and um but I also wishful thinking like to imagine that
you know maybe us introverts are the ancestors of the astronomers and people who maybe had to stay
up at night to look at the stars to be able to tell when to plant things or do things like that
um God loves beetles yeah they're the most common species on the planet like one in three species
around is a beetle planet of the people we had a time machine how far would we be able to go
Back To The Future Three when he goes to the Indians so good steal a few babies and raise
them today without anyone noticing that they're a bit different there is much debate anatomically
there's some science coming out recently about this or whether or not brains have changed over
like the last 30 000 years and they currently actually don't think they've really changed but
surely something changed because we only started painting on caves like 42 000 years ago and okay
like in Indonesia so it's like what what happened there and then language is only like 6 000 years
old or something so I'll say what what caused the spur the changes in these in these times debate
anatomically modern humans emerged 200 000 years ago but probably seventy Thousand Years is as far
as we could travel back and I disagree we have uh evidence in Australia for Aborigines existing
Beyond so many thousand years I think it's like 80 000 years and so I think there's even some
tools to suspect it might be like 120 000 years Aborigines uh and I think this has been pushed
back to maybe about 300 000 years and I saw some recent studies finding some tools that we think
were used by you know humans about 500 000 years because they were like axes and things but that
could the last bit could be um mistaken that was a while ago that I read that anyway things
to keep in mind do your own research this is not the area I look into just curious and like reading
you should come check out Kelvin post Quantum VPN I've created you can get a free little trial come
check it out it's got the best encryption on the internet I can literally protect you from
quantum computers to still snatch a behaviorally modern human before that the babies would probably
lack a few crucial gene mutations necessary to build a brain with modern language and abstract
thinking abilities that sounds so interesting to think about Point around fifty thousand years ago
there was an explosion in Innovation tools and weapons became more sophisticated I don't know
because if you think about just Natural Selections selection defining Evolution you know there has to
be evolutionary pressures right so it's like you know and all all um changes of mutations and so
every species every you know baby is actually the same species as its parent technically
which is hard to think about and then imagine how we've changed so much from fish and so uh
so mutations right random mutations in your DNA but there might be other mechanisms like some
people have put forward geneticist ideas of like molecules the structure and shape being passed on
um but anyway so passing on uh genetics uh some mutation if that's the only way well then there
must have been random mutations in maybe the brain and different areas of the brain for these
babies and things that might have allowed them to do things that increase their survivability which
I imagine you know if you're able to like be more coordinated if you're able to remember if you're
able to speak or guide your the others in your tribe your survivability goes up so I imagine
like he suggested these things would have accumulated over time
and that tribe whoever had you know that baby with the mutation which it you know passed on to its
Offspring this is all me just speculating right this is you don't take my word for this stuff you
know just fun to do this entertainment because at this point humans had a multi-purpose brain and a
more advanced language to communicate information with each other effectively and down to the Last
Detail this allowed much closer cooperation and is what really makes us different from any
other creature on earth not our comparatively weak bodies and inferior senses but the ability there's
lots of animals flexibly in large groups there's lots of animals that do this rigid beehives or
intimate but tiny wolf packs as our brain evolves can I do fairly similar things like bees have the
language and very complex languages and wolves can communicate I might have missed the specific
word he used we became able to do something life had been unable to do up to this point
one expand knowledge quickly two preserve the knowledge gained over Generations three build
on past knowledge to gain even deeper insights this seems Daft but until then information had to
be passed on from generation to generation mostly through genetics which is not efficient still for
the next Forty thousand years that's true you're passing on information through stories and through
memory wow that is clearly a great benefit to have rather than just relying on slow Evolution through
um through genetics you can just pass on the stories and so obviously when we started telling
stories that must have been a bit where we kind of exploded surely in our development and painting
and art and then obviously writing even more so more recently human life remained more or
less the same there was little to build Upon Our Ancestors were only one animal among many
building a skyscraper without knowing what a house is is hard but one it's easy to be arrogant in our
attitude to our ancestors this would be ignorant humans 50 000 years ago were survival Specialists
that ramble they had a detailed mental map of their territory their senses were fine-tuned to
the environment they knew and memorized a great amount of information about plants and animals
they could make complicated tools that required years of careful training and they would
definitely probably fitter than you very fine motor skills their bodies compared to our athletes
today just because of their daily routines and they lived a rich social life within their tribe
I imagined people were more like Rambo back in that time survival required so many skills that
the average brain volume of early modern humans might even have been bigger than it is today
as a group we know more today but as individuals our ancestors were Superior to us
but then around 12 000 years ago in multiple locations humans developed agriculture everything
changed very quickly before survival as a hunter and forager why did agriculture develop probably
from the ability to share stories and failures and writing you know you can write down what worked
you do this over a few generations and wow you've got so much knowledge just by trial and error now
yeah it's in a way science the scientific method it's really cool to think about but
superb physical and mental abilities in all fields from everybody with the rise of the
Agricultural age individuals could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival
this meant that some of them could specialize maybe they worked on better tools maybe they took
time to breathe more resistant crops or better livestock maybe they started inventing things
as farming got more and more efficient what we call civilization began agriculture gave us a
reliable and predictable food source which allowed humans to hold food on a large scale for the first
time which is much easier to do with grains than meat the food stock required protection
which led to communities living together in tighter spaces first early defense structures
were built the need for organization grew the more organized we got the faster things became
efficient Villages became cities cities became kingdoms kingdoms became Empires
connections between humans explode amazing to realize there's been what like 170 billions
humans to ever live and roughly half of them existed about before this time
isn't that crazy all of those humans before you know Jesus well before that actually so it's like
wow what were all those humans doing they were doing something similar to us but what a different
life they lived which led to opportunities to exchange knowledge progress became exponential
about 500 years ago the Scientific Revolution began mathematics physics
astronomy biology and chemistry transformed everything we thought we knew did he say 500
yeah about 500 but really it was about 2 000 years ago and but unfortunately we destroyed
all of that knowledge and destroyed the Library of Alexandria where science was kind of born but
um fizzled out momentarily because of some shitty politics and
um yeah some people speculate we might be going to the Stars right now if that hadn't have happened
where science was essentially born yeah we lost a lot of that science as well to just history like
there's only a couple Scrolls left uh and that they're quite amazing from that that Library so
and there was a meant to be many many many that uh we we speculate we lost so it's very interesting
the Industrial Revolution followed soon after laying the foundation for the modern world
you guys know all about from here on through exponentially more people could spend their
lifetime contributing to the progress of humanity I do know about Taiko Brach and uh his relation to
um it's Evolution into a medium we all use on a daily basis and the rise of the internet shaped
our world it's hard to grasp how fast all of that happened it's been about 125 000 Generations since
the emergence of the first human species 7 500 Generations since the physiologically modern human
saw the light of day 500 Generations ago what we call civilization began 20 Generations ago we
learned how to do science and the internet became available to most people only one generation ago
Today We Live in the most prosperous age Humanity has ever experienced we have transformed this
planet from the composition of its atmosphere to large-scale changes in its landscape and
also in terms of the other animals in existence light up the night with artificial stars and put
people in a metal box in the sky some have even walked around we put robots on other planets
we've all happened very very recently it's crazy it's deep into the past of the universe
with mechanical eyes our knowledge and our way of acquiring and storing more of it has exploded I
think it's important to point out our universe is literally grown massively in terms of like
how big we thought this place was which high school student today knows the complexity of
the world as well or about the universe than a scholar a few centuries ago humans dominate
this planet even if our rule is very fragile we are still not that different from our ancestors
seventy thousand years ago but your lifestyle has existed for less than 0.001 of human history
from here on there's no saying what the future holds for us we're building a skyscraper but
we're not sure if it's standing on a solid foundation or if we're building it on quicksand
let's leave it with that for now the next time you miss your train your burger is
not hot enough or someone cuts in line remember how special this made-up human world it's like
we're building these skyscrapers of knowledge on top of some structure that might be there
underneath although girdles theorem kind of throws some shade at that Let's ignore that
under this maybe you know fundamental objective structure and uh you know the our structure though
is flimsy and it kind of moves you know with Revolutions of knowledge and it's fun to think
about and it's like there's other mountains or skyscrapers of knowledge and they're all
interconnected and so you shift one they all kind of shift some are larger than others and
it's crazy and this it seems like there's some kind of mysterious structure underneath but
you know if you know anything about girdles theorem it might be truth that transcends
logic unfortunately it is maybe it's not worth being upset about all those little things
okay this was our first takeoff yep it's like car Sagan says in a roughly 100 billion
galaxies about 2 trillion now uh you'll not find another human being so you know if they
do something wrong if they get upset with you let them live especially if you don't agree with them
so anyway my friends that is the end of today's stream