Think Like a Gorilla: Civilization Is Not Such a Great Project Really

It’s not as if civilization just happened to us humans! We have been shaping it for 12,000 years—ever since the glacial ice receded and the climate stabilized. That’s a long time until we compare it to the 200,000 years that we humans have been on the planet. Which begs us to ask: what was happening those other 180,000 years and why did we humans feel a need to civilize it?

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Is Human Prehistory Really Inferior to Multi Earth History?

Two diagrams have contributed to my awareness of the One Earth and Multi Earth stories as I see them operate both in and out of the consciousness of our species today. I first saw a version of these diagrams when Juanita and I read aloud to one another Daniel Quinn’s book, Ishmael.

In that story Ishmael, a gorilla, teaches a person about a way of viewing the world that includes not just humans but gorillas and all species. As his adult student returns regularly to the gorilla’s cage for more lessons, Ishmael challenges his student’s understanding of history. As Juanita and I read, my own view of history also came under the microscope. I, too, had been schooled to equate the history of human civilization with all of “history.”

Even more narrowly, most of what was called “world history” in my schooling was, as I said earlier, no more than the significant, but limited, story of western civilization. As I learned it, whatever came before that “history” was simply lumped together as “prehistory.” Prehistory was inferior to history. So I came to understand that we humans are an advanced species, having ascended from prehistory into history by way of one long continuous storyline that leads to the shining present. It could be simply diagrammed as follows.

Prehistory ————————-> History (10,000 BCE) ———————>

Before getting to the second diagram, the one that rattled my worldview, how about you? What were you taught about the relative significance of prehistory and history? And did your “world history” include more than the history of western civilization? Hopefully, my schooling was the exception.

Putting Ourselves in the Geological Epochs

Here is another excerpt from an early chapter of an upcoming book on an economy that fits our one planet, Earth.

The revelatory aspect of the ecological age finds expression in the ecological archetype which finds its most effective expression in the great story of the universe.

—Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, p. 34

What time is it in Earth’s story? Thinking in terms of geological epochs, we currently live in the Holocene epoch, a subcategory of the Pleistocene Era. The Holocene dates from 12,000 years ago, or 10,000 BCE. That is when the last epoch of glaciation across the northern hemisphere receded and temperatures began to moderate globally. All of what we call the “history of civilization” has happened within this Holocene period (Wikipedia) —a period of relative climate stability. The story of homo sapiens goes back well before civilization to 200,000 years ago. That puts the emergence of our homo sapiens ancestors in the latter part of the Pleistocene epoch which measures back to 1.8 million years ago.

The appearance of civilization, so recent in the human story, begs the question of how our ancestors embraced or resisted the big changes that evolved with the emergence of the civilization project. Because saying “yes” or “no” to what the process of civilization calls progress continues today, we can project ourselves into those same debates of our ancestors 12,000 years ago.

As temperatures moderated in the Holocene epoch, changes began to accelerate and the debates inevitably followed. What was good about the changes? What was not? Was a more sedentary lifestyle really better than a migratory or nomadic one? Not for many whose migratory patterns became blocked by settlements. Settling in a location became more and more possible as humans learned to select seeds and grow grains with nutrition and greater yield. Previously, humans had necessarily followed migratory herds and food sources that changed with seasons and weather cycles. Only in the Holocene epoch did homo sapiens accelerate the development of agriculture, exchange of resources, trade, and language skills. Transportation, writing, standards of measurement, art, contracts—all these and other components to “civilize” life evolved.

The advance and progress these capacities brought, organized humans in new ways. Advance and “progress” did not automatically empower all equally. Power and wealth concentrated among some even at the expense of others and of nature herself. Occupations increased in specialization. Villages became towns; towns became cities. Huge ambivalences regarding justice emerged. Contradictory views on good and evil emerged and expanded throughout civilization as its story unfolded over millennia to the present (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization).

In time, rules for owning land privately and making economic exchanges through money greatly accelerated the civilization story, a story that became more and more a story of economic domination, and more and more a story of the domination of the homo sapiens species over all others. The good and evil in this evolving story is staring us down today—12,000 years from its beginning, just a staccato note in the music of Earth and Cosmos.

Today, it is common for humans to function with amnesia regarding the recentness of our presence as part of Earth’s majestic trajectory. For that reason, putting ourselves in the geological timeline adjusts the lens we use for seeing how we fit in with Earth herself. It gives us a perspective that the human civilization story does not. The geological timeline reveals important truth missed by the civilization story, namely, that for hundreds of thousands of years homo sapiens lived WITHIN the story of a single planet. For all those years on Earth, we humans did not threaten the carrying capacity of Earth to sustain and regenerate life. We fit.

Despite this important revelation, most modern human beings will not find much in this evolutionary timeline to excite us for living today. After all, have we not evolved to a higher level of consciousness and capacity than those primitive peoples? Are primitive peoples not dying out, a relic of past times? What is there for us to aspire to among the uncivilized? Do they not need to be brought into the modern world? None of us wants to be a hunter or gatherer today.

Today, words like “primitive” and “uncivilized” are used to emphasize the inferior status of these early humans compared to us. They had not yet evolved to our advanced brain capacities or cultural complexities. Against this usage, and in light of how modern humans exceed Earth’s carrying capacity, I want to emphasize that “primitive” also means first, primary, primal or foundational; and “uncivilized” also refers to capacities that all of us have to this day which we can use to undo or resist “civilizing” influences that we determine to be unhealthy for us and our planet.