Around seventy thousand years ago there lived a species called Apes in the western regions of Africa foraging for food and trying to survive in the kingdom where lived far more dangerous creature than them, where they were not the hunters but hunted. But this was soon going to change………
It is believed that Apes evolved themselves to be what is present Homo Sapiens. Well, that’s a pretty subtle way to summarize the whole ordeal. There are several questions related to the evolution of humans. The one being — How were the Apes able to work on one goal with other strangers apart from near relatives? As it is a known tendency among animals that they are not interested to work in a large number for anything, they generally spend their lives living and hunting in their group of a few.
Here comes THE POWER OF STORYTELLING (Fruit of Cognitive Revolution).
It is speculated that Homo Sapiens were able to work in large groups (more than 20) as they believed in some stories/myths that were prominent at the time. The materialistic and emotional attachment of homo sapiens were a few reasons why they agreed to trust in such stories and follow a path decided for them by others aggregating in large numbers for a cause that had no significant advantage for them.
Some say this power enabled them to wipe out a whole other species of humans (Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Erectus, Homo Soleonsis, etc) making Homo Sapiens sole survivor in humans or I may say carrying out the first genocide of the world (no one knows, maybe no one will know).
This power was soon going to make them the most populous, intelligent, cruel, and cunning creature of the world. The ignited curiosity in the minds of Homo Sapiens made them travel in large numbers around the Afro Asian terrains, and then by crossing the oceans via what is believed to be the first kind of boat to the islands of Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, and by crossing the wilderness of Siberia on foot to the continent of Americas. This led to the presence of human footprints on almost all continents ( which can be called mass settlement).
THE EMERGENCE OF IMAGINED REALITY (Fruit of the POWER OF STORYTELLING) And The Existential Crisis of Existing Reality
The well-known Dante Alighieri painted his imagination of hell, a concept brewed by fancy stories of the past. And now we are believing in these painted pictures of hell, heaven, the afterlife and forgetting the very existing reality on which we depend to survive.
The stories of Adam Eve, Religions, Countries, Democracy, Monarchy, Currency, Nations, Borders, Rights, Marriage everything have been systematically crafted over years by the society for society to curtail the entropy of the world. But what has taken the worst hit by the emergence of imagined reality — the existing reality.
What is real in this world — Air, Water, Fire, Nature, Hunger, ………, Death. They have been reduced to secondary status while primary importance took up by imagined reality. This has led to the existential crisis of existing reality. We homo sapiens have completely changed the outlook of what life should be for the momentary comfort, the lust for immortality, and achieving superficial supremacy over the decades.
Blood has shed in the names of religion, country, rights, power, pleasure, and money. Myths have turned out to be the most powerful weapon on the Earth and the Storytellers the Master of the World.
Thank you for reading this article. The motivation behind writing this article was gotten after reading the book Sapiens- by Yuval Noah Harari.
