get being uncomfortable¶

I get being uncomfortable. It's a totally natural reaction to the feeling of "insignificance" of your place in the sheer scale of time and space surrounding you, spanning infinitely in all directions.

But that's not how I feel when I think about these artifacts. https://t.co/OYVKgYtjK0 Also, cool it on the hate for this dude. Like I said, this reaction is totally understandable. Big things tend to blow minds. If you don't have some sort of staggering emotional reaction to this kind of stuff, I kinda don't know how to relate to you. When I think of Lomekwi, Oldowan, and Acheulean tools, of all the millions of years of innovation and culture that precedes and defines us, I feel uplifted and inspired, knowing that we are all part of an unbroken legacy of adaptability, unprecedented in the history of life. We see the same sparks of that incredible capacity in our existing cousins, in the great apes that we like to pretend are "mere animals." They make tools as well. They craft societies and use language and educate their children.

But our ancestors made a qualitative leap. Similar traits, similar ecological strategies, similar emphasis on crafting and adapting and collaborating. Over millions of years, the quantitative tweaks culminated in a seismic shift in our evolutionary trajectory. And this happened millions of years ago. It takes an astonishing chauvinism to believe these people -- our ancestors and cousins -- were somehow "less human" than us. They WERE us. They invented the tools that defined us for millions of years, and used them to transcend the shackles of niche. We expanded everywhere. We thrived in savannahs, rainforests, deserts, taigas, islands, and marshes. Populations diverged and converged a million times. There are no distinct boundaries between homo species -- we interbred and backcrossed wherever we rediscovered each other, and new populations arose. We can comfortably claim neanderthalis, erectus, habilis, and more as part of our family: our ancestors, our cousins, our partners... us. When we close ourselves off to the rest of our family, we must seem so small, so young. But we're not. We are ancient. Millions of years old. There's no reason to feel small when you see how old our oldest tools are. You should feel proud. Immense. Human.