Our World: A Modern Marvel#

The world we live in today feels completely normal, right? Like this is just how humans have always existed. But here’s the thing: it’s really not. Never before have we humans lived in a world so fancy and built just for our needs. This luxury means we don’t have to constantly worry about just staying alive. Things like food, a place to live, and feeling safe? For most of us, we just take them for granted.

But we’re kind of a unique bunch in the grand scheme of things. For way more than 99.99% of human history, life was totally different. And honestly, there isn’t just one single story of human history.

The Long Story Begins: Early Humans and Our Cousins#

Our story really kicks off about 6 million years ago. That’s when the big split happened – our tribe, called hominini, went one way, and our relationship with apes ended.

Then, fast forward to about 2.8 million years ago. This is when the group of beings we call Homo, the very first humans, showed up. Now, we like to think we’re the only humans, but that’s just not true. When we, Homo sapiens sapiens (that’s us!), arrived on the scene about 200,000 years ago, there were at least six other human species hanging around.

Think of them as cousins. They were pretty smart and capable, probably on par with us. It must have been really strange, maybe even a little scary, kind of like living alongside aliens! Some of these cousins were incredibly successful. Take Homo erectus, for instance – they stuck around for a whopping 2 million years. That’s ten times longer than modern humans have even been around!

The very last of these other human species disappeared about 10,000 years ago. We’re still not totally sure why they died out. We know that modern humans have at least a few percent of Neanderthal and other human DNA in us, so there was definitely some mixing going on. But it wasn’t like a full merger between species. So, whether our cousins vanished because they couldn’t win the fight for resources or because of a series of smaller-scale horrible events (minor genocides) is still a mystery. Either way, only we remain.

The Dawn of Progress: Tools, Fire, and Communication#

Let’s rewind back to the early days of humanity, around 2.8 million years ago. Early humans used tools back then, but they didn’t really make huge leaps forward for nearly 2 million years.

Then came a game-changer: they learned to control fire. This was massive!

• Cooking: Made food more nutritious, which helped our brains grow.
• Light and Warmth: Made days feel longer and winters way less miserable.
• Protection: Scared away predators.
• Hunting: Could be used for hunting. Burning wood or grassland would turn up pre-roasted small animals, nuts, and roots.

From about 300,000 years ago, most of the different human species lived in small groups, doing the hunter-gatherer thing. They had fire, used tools made of wood and stone, planned ahead a bit, buried their dead, and had their own unique ways of life (cultures).

But perhaps the most important thing? They talked to each other. It was probably a kind of basic language, not as complex as ours, but they communicated.

The Question of Time Travel and Modern Humans#

Here’s a fun thought experiment: If we had a time machine, how far back could we go, grab some babies, and raise them today without anyone really noticing they were different? People debate this a lot.

Physically, modern humans first appeared around 200,000 years ago. But you could probably only go back about 70,000 years and still find a baby who could grow up to be a fully “behaviorally modern” human like us. If you went back earlier than that, the babies would likely be missing some key changes in their genes needed to build a brain capable of modern language and thinking abstractly.

The Innovation Boom and What Makes Us Unique#

Something big happened around 50,000 years ago – a sudden burst of new ideas and inventions. Tools and weapons got way more complex, and culture became richer. Why? Because by this time, humans had a brain that could do lots of different things, and a more advanced language. This language allowed us to share information really effectively, right down to the tiny details.

This ability to communicate complex ideas led to much closer cooperation. And that is what truly sets us apart from every other creature on Earth. It’s not our relatively weak bodies or not-so-great senses compared to some animals. It’s our ability to cooperate flexibly in large groups. Unlike, say, a beehive which is rigid, or wolf packs which are close-knit but small.

As our brain kept evolving, we became capable of things that life hadn’t really been able to do before:

1. Expand knowledge quickly.
2. Keep the knowledge learned over many generations.
3. Use old knowledge as a base to figure out even deeper stuff.

This might sound simple, but until then, information was mostly passed down through genes, which isn’t a very efficient way to learn and improve.

Life Before Farming: The Expert Survivor#

Even with these new abilities, for the next 40,000 years, human life stayed pretty much the same. There wasn’t much to build upon yet. Our ancestors were just one type of animal among many. Trying to build something like a skyscraper is hard if you don’t even know what a simple house is!

It’s easy for us now to feel a bit arrogant about our ancestors, but that would be missing the point entirely. Humans from 50,000 years ago were absolute specialists at survival.

• They had incredibly detailed mental maps of the areas they lived in.
• Their senses were perfectly tuned to spot things in their environment.
• They knew and remembered a huge amount of information about plants and animals.
• They could make complicated tools that needed years of careful practice and really precise hand movements.
• Their bodies were as fit as today’s top athletes just from their daily life.
• They had rich social lives within their tribes.

Survival needed so many different skills that the average brain size of early modern humans might have even been bigger than it is today! As a group, we definitely know more now. But as individuals, our ancestors were probably better at just surviving and knowing their immediate world than we are.

The Big Change: Agriculture#

But then, around 12,000 years ago, things shifted dramatically. In several different places around the world, humans figured out agriculture – farming. Everything started changing really fast.

Before agriculture, surviving as a hunter and gatherer meant everyone needed amazing physical and mental skills across the board. With farming, people could start relying on others’ skills more for survival. This meant some people could focus on just one thing – they could specialize.

• Maybe someone worked on making better tools.
• Maybe someone took the time to breed crops that didn’t die easily or raise better livestock.
• Maybe someone just started inventing things.

As farming got more and more efficient, that’s when we started seeing what we call civilization.

Agriculture gave us a food supply that was reliable and you could predict it would be there. For the first time, humans could gather and store food on a large scale. (This was much easier to do with grains than with hunted meat).

Having a big stock of food needed protecting. This led to communities living closer together for safety. First, people built simple defenses. Then, the need for organization grew. The more organized groups became, the faster things got more efficient.

Villages grew into cities. Cities grew into kingdoms. Kingdoms grew into empires. The connections between humans exploded, opening up huge opportunities to share knowledge. And because knowledge could be shared and built upon so easily now, progress became incredibly fast – what you could call exponential.

The Accelerating Pace of Change#

About 500 years ago, the Scientific Revolution kicked off. Fields like Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, Biology, and Chemistry completely changed everything we thought we knew about the world.

Soon after, the Industrial Revolution happened. This laid the groundwork for the modern world we see today. As our overall ability to do things efficiently grew super fast, more and more people had the chance to spend their whole lives adding to humanity’s progress instead of just trying to survive.

Big changes kept happening. The invention of the computer, how it changed into something we all use every day, and the rise of the Internet – these reshaped our world yet again.

It’s hard to even fully grasp just how quickly all of this happened in the grand scheme of things.

Let’s put it in terms of generations:

• It’s been about 125,000 generations since the very first human species appeared.
• About 7,500 generations ago, humans like us (physiologically modern humans) first came into being.
• 500 generations ago, what we call civilization really began.
• 20 generations ago, we figured out how to do science properly.
• And the Internet? Most people have only had access to that for about one generation.

Today: Prosperity and Uncertainty#

Today, we are living in the most well-off time humanity has ever known. We’ve completely changed this planet – from what’s in the air to huge shifts in the land itself, and even the types of animals that are around. We light up the night with artificial lights that look like stars and send people up into the sky in metal boxes (airplanes). Some people have even walked on our Moon! We’ve sent robots to other planets and used amazing instruments to look deep into the universe’s past.

Our knowledge, and how we get and keep more of it, has just exploded. The average student in high school today knows more about the universe than a brilliant scholar did just a few centuries ago!

Humans are definitely in charge of this planet right now, even if our control feels a bit fragile sometimes.

Deep down, we’re still not all that different from our ancestors 70,000 years ago. But the way you live your life has only existed for less than 0.001% of human history.

From this point forward, nobody can really say what the future holds for us. It feels like we’re building a huge skyscraper, but we’re not totally sure if the ground beneath it is solid rock or sinking quicksand.

Let’s just leave it there for now.

A Thought for Your Day#

So, the next time you miss your train, or your burger isn’t quite hot enough, or someone cuts in front of you in line… take a moment. Remember just how incredibly special this whole “made-up” human world we live in is. Maybe, just maybe, those little things aren’t really worth getting upset about after all.

A Note From the Creators (Video Specifics)#

Okay, so this was our first try at making a video about history like this. We’d absolutely love to make a lot more! But they take even longer to put together than our usual videos. So, we might only be able to do about 3 or 4 of them each year. Your thoughts and feedback are really welcome here!

Thank you so much for watching. If you’d like to support us directly, you can check out our Patreon page. It seriously helps us out a lot. While you’re thinking about it, here are some more videos you might like, in case you need a little more to watch! (Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGiQaabX3_o)