THE TRILOGY: "Conquering the world" Chapter 2

Because having plenty of food gives you time to think

In the last chapter we learnt what features made the Homo sapiens so successful in world expansion, but we also have to understand how did they get these characteristics and what happened in Africa to transform a little group of hunter gatherers, not as different as the ones before them, into an organized and complex society who could exploit nearly all the resources of the environment.

Firstly we have to understand why would an animal defend or fight and form groups. The answer is easy à resources. Individuals act in groups in order to reach certain goals which would secure their survivability and offspring. An easy way to obtain this is guaranteeing your food supply. However, defending these resources will only happen if you know where they are and if they appear in large quantities in a specific place. If these resources are available for everybody and everywhere the energy you will spend in its defence is not worth it.

So, where can these places be found where food can be defended in a beneficial way? The answer is African coastal regions rich in seafood. Humans learnt that crustaceans were a big energy source that is easy to obtain and can be found in great numbers in a specific and relatively small areas. This discovery took place around 160 to 120 thousand years ago, but it did not happen by chance, as it is thought that during that time temperature got colder and many of the food sources of humans disappeared. This also meant that competition between humans increased, subsequently bringing territoriality and conflicts with other groups.

As it was explained in the previous chapter violence and social relationship come together and scientist claim that the social revolution that came along the territoriality concluded in extreme cooperation with improved learning skills and finally complex tools as long range weapons which would be essential to continue the conquest of the world.

If we think about it, the actual situation is more or less the same, nations or organizations (large groups of people) compete with each other for limited resources like petroleum, water and fertile land. This is something we can observe in all organisms and an important part of natural selection but the scale in which is done is nowhere close to what we can find in nature. Maybe humans have gone too far, maybe it is just that we need to expand once again as we did in Africa. For now our technology is not able to create colonies in other planets or huge space stations, but techniques like terraformation are being studied and in a future they may be something more than science fiction.

In any case, we are here to talk about the past maybe in another blog, maybe in another life we will discuss the space conquest, as for now let’s continue in chapter #3.

#TRILOGY