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Life's Focus Much Different 70,000 Years Ago

Posted on: Sunday, 14 September 2008, 00:00 CDT

By Wolfgang Niesielski

Just a mere 70,000 years ago humanity was on the brink of extinction, according to a recent study. At that time the entire population, which now numbers about 6.6 billion people, contained perhaps only about 2,000 individuals!

Just imagine at that time you probably knew just about each and every person on earth or at least one of his or her cousins. That pretty much means the six degrees of separation boiled down to almost zero. The expression that the entire world was watching the Olympics, for example, would have meant literally that at the time. You pretty well could easily fit the entire world's population into any high school arena.

I wonder who would have sponsored athletes back then; good thing it wasn't the tobacco industry. We can count ourselves extremely lucky that cigarette smoking was virtually unknown then because paper hadn't been invented, or you can bet we'd be extinct for sure now. Come to think of it, with no knowledge of paper, as well as any modern tools, we also could not play the "paper, rock, and scissors" game because if you only have "rock" available, that practically cancels out anyone's chances of winning. It makes you wonder what they did all night sitting around the campfire.

Raising kids must have been much easier in those days. For example, if teenagers wanted to borrow the family wheels for a joy ride, all a parent had to say was, "For crying out loud, wait until someone invents it first!" Talking about youth during the Stone Age, with rocks in abundance, rock music must have already been quite popular. But, of course, disco didn't exist yet, which fortunately, decreased embarrassing moments of teens rolling around laughing while looking at pictures of their parents dressed in bell-bottom baby blue jumpsuits. Kids had a lot more respect for their parents back then.

Left only with plunking and twanging the entrails of an occasional moose, availability to first-class musical instruments was rare, which pretty much would have cut down most forms of musical expression, except maybe rapping. Unfortunately for rap artistes, the entire vocabulary range during those years of scarcity was probably limited to only a few dozen words. And perhaps half a dozen of those were already used up to describe different types of dung, expressions actually very practical for trackers to ascertain time and distance of prey during a hunt.

Even today with a dictionary at hand, how many words can you find that rhyme with mammoth manure? Facing fearsome audiences equipped with clubs and spears, rappers were eventually forced to invent record albums they could rhythmically scratch and scrape, to cover up awkward voids due to scant, inadequate terminology.

Obviously, though, life back then was less focused on celebrities and entertainment and more on cooking, an endeavor largely limited to tossing some living thing onto the fire and then munching on charred meat. This actually was an enormous improvement in the area of culinary achievements, standing head and shoulders above the previous practice of devouring the animal raw (progress that has been lost on today's sushi crowd, by the way).

Certainly the inventor of fire must have been the world's first celebrity. Good thing his or her identity has been lost in the annals of history because that name would soon be mud as this culprit set us on a downward-spiraling journey toward today's climate change, due to escalating carbon emissions. Starting with the occasional wood fire back then, pollution has now accelerated to the point of almost total ecological collapse! So, if things continue we might end up where we started, with just a few of us surviving. But at least we can console ourselves with the fact that with access to today's mammoth vocabulary, perhaps rap music will be improved.

Source: Oakland Tribune

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