I was looking at the stars the other night, staring into the infinite, feeling small and in awe of something much larger than my little bundle of 'problems', when I was hit with a thought.
When we talk about 'cave people' or 'prehistoric man' , a wide range of images come to mind, but rarely are they in the vein of anything that could be described as positive. Surveying my own word and image associations came up with something akin to Fred Flintstone swinging his club at his wife and throwing faecel matter at his kids.
I think when we are dealing with pre-history it's easy to write these people off as something much less than us, but really, where does this judgement come from? I certainly did not build this image based on proposed fact or even sound reasoning. It's easy to think of them as less evolved because they had not the conveniences of microwaves, laser acne treatment and mobile dog-grooming mobiles, but were they less evolved because of this?
Looking at our evidence, the oldest Aboriginal bones in Australia were found to be 60,000 years old according to carbon dating. Homo Sapien has been around in its current evolution for at least 100,000 years. And without trains, planes and automobiles, these people survived. Anyone who has spent a night in the jungle could testify to this being no small feat.
They lived with a closer association to nature than we are akin to in our current society. In my study of our recorded civilizations, this is one of the larger commonalities. It seems when we create a civilization, we begin to feel like we are above nature, that because we rely less and less on the system that it makes us less and less a part of it. And when we begin to become ignorant of the natural system that we are all a part of, we unknowingly interfere with them and experience the effects of our cause.
We talk about the Stone Age, Iron Age or Bronze Age as if these were all steps to the pedestal in which we perch upon now. We have their social and technological innovations in bold bullet points as penance for our 21st century ease. I am sure, in future classrooms, we will look back on the Consumer Age with the same bullet points, and the same sense of crazed abandon.
Nothing lasts forever, and I enjoy how 15 years ago you couldn't talk about God without Religion, ecology without dreadlocks and spirit without incense.
Fast forward to today, where Oprah is getting her own channel, Green's have a political party, and the wacky scientist that used to give James Bond the shits with ever evolving gadgetry is now working on cures for cancer and drugs to enhance geriatric sex.
If anything, I'm optimistic.
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