2 million years seems like an absurdly long time, doesn’t it?
That is the wild-pitch, longest possible length of time that humans, proto-humans, or human-like people have populated this much more ancient planet. When we think of it in terms of us, like “somebody like me,” living, breathing, walking, talking, singing, having babies, hunting, tending fires … it seems like forever ago.
But it’s really not.
400 million years ago, the North American continent was under water, and there were really odd creatures living, breathing, swimming, vibing out their feelings somehow, laying eggs, hunting or being hunted … and now they are fossils and we can see them in places where the river washed away enough stuff to reveal the ocean floor, like here in the middle of Iowa at the Devonian Gorge, or Palisades Kepler State Park. We were part of the Euramerican landmass, Laurentia, not yet broken off into our own thing.
Dinosaurs roamed the Earth from 252-66 million years ago. Yeah, that’s 186 million years that they were living, breathing, walking, roaring, howling, having babies, hunting or being hunted and running from fires. One hundred and eighty-six million years.
We aren’t even toddlers yet. I’m sorry, folks, humanity isn’t really even a blip that needs attention. 2 million years is the very outside of the possible timeline, and it wasn’t until around 120 thousand years ago that we started leaving any footprints in the geological record. And those are hotly disputed.
One of the very earliest indisputable “made things” that humans left behind is in Turkey, Gobekli Tepe, dated to between 9500-8000 BCE. And a lot of people think, “Ah! Humans started building temples to their gods, progress! They’re getting smarter!” No, they’re just using big chunks of flint and rock to “write things down.” Astroarchaeology has shown it to be a star chart, basically. This star or constellation rises here, this one over here, and as they became inaccurate over time they were buried and new “temples” were made. Maybe they were getting dumber and needing to write stuff down so they didn’t forget it? Hell of a grocery list to lug around …
Settlements and cities pop up around temple sites, wherever they appear. Somebody has to do the grunt work of tending the temple, keeping the priesthood fed, dealing with the laundry and the catering … Structures meant a certain amount of bureaucracy. Suddenly there are Bosses and Workers. Well, sucks to be on the receiving end of that totem pole.
And yeah, no other animal that we know of evolved a brain capable of dreaming up bureaucracy. Go us!
Health “care” system.
Banking, lending, investing.
Systematic disenfranchisement of non-White, non-male, non-cis/hetero people.
The Supreme Court of the US actually taking away established rights from an entire half of the population.
The dinosaurs never had any of that shit, and look what it got them? Blasted from space by an event they had absolutely no control over. If not for that asteroid, they’d probably still be here.
And now, because some bright spark decided that corporations should have the same rights as people, corporate greed has launched yet another mass extinction event. And we’ve only been at this civilization stuff for … 11,000 years, give or take? Not bad! Not bad at all, humanity! Look at you go.
Michael and I spent some time at Effigy Mounds State Park in Northeast Iowa, and saw photos of what the landscape was like two hundred years ago compared to today, and it was … sickening. Progress has been really destructive.
Where’s the hope? There ain’t much. But we are very, very good at adapting, and once we crush the patriarchy once and for all and kill the corporations, we might have a shot at making some progress toward a solution. There are some ferociously smart people who are desperately trying to find ways to keep humanity from going super-nova, and they are just as desperately underfunded and never taken seriously, of course. Doesn’t every single disaster movie ever start with the scientist saying, “Oh, shit, will you look at that? We have to do something expensive and inconvenient in order to save humanity,” and everybody else says, “Nope nope nope shut up shut up shut up.” And then the thing happens, and the scientist does the thing, or as much of the thing as it’s still possible to do, and humanity is saved to fuck up another day. Where is Jeff Goldblum when you really need him?
This is where we are. The scientist is sulking in the corner, shaking their head as people keep doing All The Wrong Things, and in about 13 minutes of screen time, the shit is actually gonna hit the fan.
2 million years, people. Come on. We have very big brains – not as big as whales or dolphins, but pretty damn impressive – so why do we seem to have such tiny, tiny hearts? I don’t understand. I will never understand. I don’t even want to understand, honestly. I like thinking the best of people, believing everybody really is doing the best they can to make their part of the world a better place … but my Pollyanna costume is falling apart and the wig has something living in it.
We have to do better, teach our children better, and be better role models for them to prioritize compassion and generosity over everything else. We have to teach them to take care of each other by taking care of each other. They learn by imitating us, so show them something empowering, generous, and rooted in love. This greed bullshit has got to stop.
Yeah, I’m grumpy and it’s hard to feel remotely optimistic right now. Welcome to my head. We can do better, loves. We must.