Читать книгу LifeLines - Malcolm Doney - Страница 33

24

Be more Beastly

We’re animals.

Most of us recognise this. We share a great deal with our fellow creatures. But how much?

The jury is still out on whether we humans are simply top of the animal class, or if we’re in a class of our own.

The origins of humankind are a mystery – not something we can be entirely certain about. The model that most people who study these things suggest is that Homo sapiens first emerged between 250,000 and 400,000 years ago. It seems that for a while we hung around, developed some basic tools, but didn’t exactly set the world alight, even if we had discovered how to light a fire.

Having migrated from Africa into Europe and managed, somehow, to elbow the Neanderthals out of the way, we seem – roughly 30–70,000 years ago – to have gone through some kind of cognitive revolution, what the historian Yuval Noah Harari calls ‘the Tree of Knowledge mutation’¹