The Collective Mind: How Early Humans Shared Experiences and Shaped Our World
It is truly as if dogs live inside our mind. In this same way, our human ancestors lived within the mind of the groups that domesticated them.
It is truly as if dogs live inside our mind. In this same way, our human ancestors lived within the mind of the groups that domesticated them.
Though emotions and motivations are shaped by family and social environments, our focus here is on the genetic aspects subject to natural selection, including sexual, social, and group selection.
The key is to draw the distinction between cooperation, in which each party co-opts something from the other in a win-win “game,” and coordination, in which the synchronized engagement of divided labor leaves no room for individual–group trade-offs, and everyone rises and falls together.
Hand Ax: these diurnal chains of communal functioning wove an unbroken fabric for 50 thousand generations across the expanse of entire continents.
Darwin: “On the whole, birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting of course man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have…”—The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)
Franz deWaal: “That was out of the question, he said, and besides, their society would not suit me: it was much too harsh for a human being..—”Chimpanzee Politics”
An ongoing odyssey, an unfinished symphony, whose ultimate fate is the province of faith, prayer, and patience
They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will refuse to yield to the despair of animal mortality. —Edward O. Wilson Cellphones: push start button below
all images by Chat GPT-4 & DALL-E-3
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Psychologist Michael Tomasello, who studies comparatively the social behavior of developing children and apes, proposes that collective communication is uniquely human and that it was evolved for collaborative foraging, and so teamwork has been the crucial human advantage. The central facts about our ancestral human species, such as upright posture, large molar teeth, and later, …
The similarity of ancestral humans and dolphins.
In the past several years, a series of books and studies by prominent scientists are quietly revolutionizing the human evolutionary narrative. Yuval Harari in his Sapiens (2014) makes no bones about his view: “The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment …
The same vanity that makes the peacock so vigorously shake its tail has not just drawn us together to seed culture, it has proceeded to become the motive engine driving our economies,
In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity in which David Graeber and David Wengrow assemble a vast array of archeological evidence from prehistory, much of it recently discovered, and interpret it in a wholly original way. The book, published in 2022, offers an alternative to the widely accepted Rousseauian narrative that, about …
Simplifies an understanding of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, language, religion, self-awareness, free will, and the experience of being human for the last three million years.
Or are we undergoing a progressive awakening to our tribe’s ancient mission to transform the power of aggression into the bounty of communion
Undoubtedly, many individuals, both male and female, prefer Donald’s bright fluffy bangs to my bald head!