Purpose
Today, at the beginning of the 21st century after 200,000 years of existence modern humans have, at best, a very rudimentary understanding of where, when, and how we became human and dispersed across the planet. Nevertheless, as an anthropologist specializing in archaeology, almost everyone I meet expresses some interest in this process. In fact, it’s your story and my story—it’s our story! Humans have been successful at responding to all sorts of challenges in the last couple of hundred thousand years and this is due, in large part, to a unique combination of curiosity and a high degree of cognitive flexibility and both are crucial to exploring and understanding our world. To be fair, humans are only one of many species that is curious and possess at least some degree of cognitive flexibility. What may set us apart from other creatures is the frequency and scale with which we bring these traits to bear. We come up with fascinating innovations and ideas all the time, every day, and in many different situations that pushes us to go farther to exceed limitations, indeed, to transcend ourselves. Although there are many fancy as well as fanciful definitions for transcendence, let’s keep it simple. Merriam-webster.com provides an excellent “Simple definition of Transcend”: to rise above or go beyond the normal limits of (something).*
By this definition humans are almost constantly involved in the process of transcendence—so pat your transcendent self on the back. Transcendence is a rarely acknowledged but ubiquitous and important fact of human existence and transcendence is a central theme in discussing successful adaptations.
Based on fossil, genetic, and archaeological evidence modern humans are about 200,000 years old. But almost everything we know of people pertains to only the last 10,000 years (about 5%) or the period shortly after the end of the Pleistocene (sometimes referred to as the Ice Age). To put our knowledge of humanity in perspective imagine meeting someone that is 50 years old and all they can recall is the last two and a half years of their life. Put another way the average lifespan of mammal species on this planet is approximately 1 million years. So as a species we’ve only lived about 20% of the average and many parts of the planet are already getting noticeably hotter, dirtier, and more crowded due to our actions. So it’s high time we roll up our sleeves and get busy transcending ourselves out of this mess and, in order to know where you are going, it helps to know where you came from. For example, Neanderthals, our oft maligned “cavemen cousins” (we share as much as 99.7% of the same DNA) existed for at least 200,000 years and may have been around longer (as much as 50,000 more years) than modern humans. Perhaps more importantly, many modern humans possess Neanderthal DNA indicating close interaction at some point in the past. At least one benefit of that close interaction was that many modern humans now carry ancient variants of immune system genes involved in destroying pathogens that we encountered when we left Africa. In short, when modern humans left Africa they had no natural immunity to many things in their new environments. So embracing our cousins instead of fighting them ultimately proved to be an excellent adaptive strategy for modern humans!
The goal of this website is to present past and current adaptations and innovations and discuss their implications, in the hopes that we will inspire even greater success in the future. While it is certainly true that humans excel at mayhem, murder, and destruction—that is not our focus (please see the nearest news outlet). While we are all aware of negative human impacts there are plenty of positive adaptations that have occurred and continue to develop and occur everyday. Our focus here is learning from our past and applying innovations to our present in order to build a positive sustainable future.