What Were we Thinking?

Dr. Harledoo believes that, since humans have existed on the earth for around 2 million years and have only been civilized for about .3% of that (roughly 6000 years), the first 1994000 years humans didn't do much of anything. Since these early humans were every bit as much human as we are, they had to have possessed the same quantity of raw intelligence. Being human, the quality and depth of their intelligence would likewise be comparable to human intelligence now. Why then didn't they DO anything?

It could be argued that these early humans were too busy just staying alive to accomplish anything. This requires that they lived in a very dangerous and deadly world, constantly hiding, darting from one shadow to another, fearful, cowering and meek. During all this time, for countless generations, humans skulked about too terrified to even make simple tools or master the kindling of fire or build even the crudest of shelters.

The earliest evidence of any human artifacts only dates back maybe 40000 years. That means that humans made nothing at all for about 196000 years. Even after learning how to make simple tools, it would another 34000 years before they established the first civilizations. That kind of existence seems wholly impossible for beings having the magnitude of intelligence humans possess. Professor Harledoo believes the notion to be absurd and indefensible. Early Humans, he claims, lived in a world so completely free of danger and stress and want that they had no need to build or organize anything, the complete lack of artifacts is exactly what we should expect.

The notion of human evolution has no significance here because these people were already fully human, indistinguishable from any human being living today. If the human intellect was as active then as it is now, to what was it applied? If people weren't making things or devising grandiose schemes for organizing themselves and their environment, what was the evolutionary benefit of their intelligence anyway? It seemed to serve no purpose and certainly gave them no advantage over the nasty beasts that allegedly tormented them. If the enormous gain in intelligence was an adaptation to their environment why did it take 1994000 years for it to manifest itself? For all the good it did, humans were at as much risk of extinction as any other animal, their intelligence gained them nothing (see this). It seems more likely that Professor Harledoo was right; there was no danger of extinction, humans were not in any great peril and human intelligence had no survival benefit. Possessing intelligence had no significance for almost two million years so one has to wonder what use people made of their ability to think. There is no evidence at all that the earliest humans applied thought to solving problems. It may be that the very concept of a "problem" would have seemed alien and kind of ridiculous. Lacking a concept of a problem, the notion of a "solution" would likewise be absurd.

It may be that people thought about "things" that would completely overwhelm our comprehension. Maybe they "talked" with plants and animals, maybe their could commune with rocks and bodies of water or even entities whose existence we deny. Maybe they just thought about nonsense, made up really clever jokes or played incredibly complicated games. It may be that their intelligence was just an amusing toy that no one thought to apply to anything "real". Whatever else they may have done, they produced nothing and left no trace of their existence (an insight to into this phenomenon (or lack thereof) can be found Here).

For approximately 28500 generations, people did nothing. All of human history has occurred in just 85 generations (a generation being 70 years or so). That seems to suggest that the intelligence we prize so highly, that we revere above all our other attributes, is either of the "wrong" kind or irrelevant. If so, then all of the accomplishments of the last 6000 years are without meaning and have nothing to do with anything that really matters. Our fascination with ourselves and our achievements is an aberration, a kind of demented vanity (there's a possible answer, here or, possibly, here.

Another interesting puzzle is that human civilizations began almost simultaneously all over the planet. It wasn't that some group of people in one place invented civilization and then exported it to people in other places. Civilization was almost instantaneous (on an historical scale) in many places. The impetus for people creating civilizations for themselves could not have been anything so obvious as over-population; there just weren't that many human beings at the time. If there was some horrendous geological or even cosmological event that drove people together, forcing them to organize themselves, there is no evidence for it. Why civilization began after 1994000 years of aimlessness is a complete mystery.