Homo Sapiens Survived by Inventing…Bullshit!
…MOVE OVER FIRE, THE WHEEL, AGRICULTURE, IT TURNS OUT THE GREATEST HUMAN INVENTION WAS…BULLSHIT! Recent bestseller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind” by Yuval Noah Harari reveals that 70,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens were able to outcompete Neanderthals by creating imaginary concepts that were able to unify larger groups. Shouldn’t we call these people something like “Homo Trumpians”?
This startling discovery by Human Anthropologists makes sense, since in the animal world, there is no bullshit while our world is full of it. Animals get food, procreate, trust their immediate family and clan, fight competitors, and die. But according to the book “Sapiens”, this limits the numbers and potential of your clan. It turns out Homo Sapiens were but one of five different human-like species 100,000 years ago, and not especially distinguished in the brain-size, muscle, or survival categories. However, they won out mainly for one reason…that they learned to lie better (and eventually create large communities based upon questionable and sometimes imaginary concepts). So imagine a war 70,000 years ago between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. The Neanderthals were bigger, had larger spears, and were more suited to the climate. But Homo Sapiens won because they set up decoys and ambushes, more or less saying “Hey Neanderthal, your shoelace is untied” (which the Neanderthals perhaps fell for time and again). Of course, this is a very sad commentary on humanity, but the supporting evidence is rather interesting and telling for the world’s future. Some examples of this “Homo Sapiens Triumph” (and my commentaries) are as follows:
Religion: One of Homo Sapiens greatest displays of bovine caca may have been religion. One can imagine that 700,000 odd-years ago in the primitive jungles of Borneo, Java Man (Homo Erectus Erectus) might’ve said something like “Sky give Sun and rain, make plant and animal grow, sky good”. They never would’ve dreamed of the convoluted, often abstruse and combative thing we have today called organized religion. Not saying “religion good” or “religion bad” (Java man’s words, not mine?) but Holy Toledo, if this is an imaginary construct to organize large groups, let’s start organizing large groups already!
Stock Market: One of the more recent towers of human excrement may be described as the “fantasy that money is everything” which is kind of funny when you realize that money is just a bunch of colored pieces of paper, cheap metals with images of bearded dead guys, and a medium of exchange. Neanderthals (Homo Neanderthalensis) may have said from a French cave 50,000 years ago “money taste bad, no good for killing deer, making fire” but of course they were dumb-dumbs (At least I think so). Of course at some level, what good is all the green stuff if you have the Neanderthals love of family, thrill of the hunt, nutritional value of hunting/gathering (what we call the fashionable Paleo diet), or awe of painting bison on cave walls for the first time? (Of course a Medical Plan or summer villa in nearby Biarritz might’ve helped, but marginally?)
Medicine: A persistent and successful Homo Sapiens myth is that there is always some sort of “medicine” that can “cure” you, and the “medicine man” has a high place in our society. In truth it may be like the old adage “Nature cures and the doctor collects the fee”. The Australopithecus Africanus of the Tanzanian Savannahs of 2 million years ago might’ve simply said “Me hunt, gather, screw, stay strong, when me fall off cliff, me die”. Now we like to pretend we are immortal, and try to sue the cliff if something bad happens. Modern medicine has become a complicated industry promising cures and therapies (often where none exist). However, like most successful Homo Sapiens “Myths”, it allows large groups of people to buy off on this candied cow-flop, which has played a key part in Nation-building.
Donald Trump and Fascism: As a Denisovan of 100,000 years ago might have said from a Siberian cave (with apologies to Tarzan) “Why words that come out of orange baboon-maned one’s mouth seem like stuff that come out of ass of wooly-mammoth?” One of anthropology’s great mysteries might be the organizational skill that Homo Sapiens sometimes applies to creating systematic lies to train less intelligent males to exact revenge on more intelligent (but weaker?) males (ie the “intellectuals” or “elites”). A rough analogy of this would be Gilligan’s Island, where somehow the rich guy (Thurston Howell III), the large and ineffective guy (The Captain), and the foolish guy (Gilligan) somehow outcompete the genius guy (The Professor) who is trying to get off the island with a 2-way radio made of coconuts and a catamaran made of palm fronds. One even imagines that The Professor is also too busy to procreate with Mary Ann and Ginger, thereby dooming the island community to eventual genetic decay and extinction. Stupidity and “might is right” are persistent human traits that often win over the masses…but how? Why?
Agriculture: Talk about an artificial belief system, we’ve been mass-deluded into thinking that grain and dairy are sacred (only to learn from Paleo advocates that it would have been healthier to stick to hunting and gathering). While 12,000 years ago, what was left of the Neanderthals were saying “Agri…whaaa?” and the rest of us were off tilling fields, domesticating animals (while creating corrupt hierarchies, forced labor and slavery, plus wars to ensure that we could control the land and water needed for all this ag). It would not be completely inaccurate to call the results of all this agriculture a type of human “fertilizer”.
Human Rights and Democracy: The most dangerous form of human manure of all (from Nature’s standpoint) may be Democracy and Human Rights. Originally conceived as a kind of cover for all of humanity’s nefarious deeds, or perhaps a way to assuage humankind’s collective guilt, at best it is successful and creates…wait for it…MORE DISGUSTING HUMANS! The few Troglodytes left on Earth (Alex Jones? Cory Lewandowski? Jeffrey Lord? Marjorie Taylor Greene? Stephen and Jason Miller?) might be asking “me no understand democracy and rights, me just bonk other guy on head, take away stuff of other guy”
Sometimes the old ways die hard.
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