Amongst the most distinct characteristics of the species which calls itself homo sapiens is curiosity. Not only do these creature show a clear and strong desire to explore and learn about its environment and the people in it for is entire life, this drive is at its most direct and basic when the creature is very young.

This seems wrong somehow

Of course, it also helps to not understand nudity and personal space taboos yet, and need things to hold on to in order to remain upright.

One can’t help but imagine the mortified parent dashing up to their innocent wee one to intervene. You don’t want to traumatize your poor kid, but you don’t want to get arrested either, or having people arching their eyebrows at you while they ask just what sort of things your child had been learning in daycare.

We really are just bright little animals when we’re that little. In fact, one of the most interesting things I’ve learned from many readings of the absolutely fascinating book The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris is that up until the age of two years old or so, the cognitive and motor development of a human baby and a chimpanzee baby will be practically identical. They will even begin to vocalize at the same times and at the same rates. It’s only after two years old that the human baby starts acquiring language, learning advanced motor skills, and in general, turning into a human being, while the young chimp has more or less peaked. It will grow bigger and stronger, and somewhat more coordinated, but in terms of cognitive development, it’s as developed as it ever will be.

So we truly do start off life not quite human beings yet. Some might find that statement offensive, and I’m not saying a newborn human being is not a human being in terms of rights, value, and so on. I’m just saying that biologically speaking, the process of going from two year old ambulatory toddler to school aged child is a lot like evolving into human beings all over again. And it’s a process we all go through, every one of us, and one we can watch in our children as they grow.

To me, that is magical and wondrous. We human beings contain such complexities because of the somewhat zigzag road to sentience we took at get to where we are now. We started as wandering primates, chimpanzees, quite dominant in our environment of the jungle valleys of Africa. So dominant that we filled our ecological niche, and some of us branched out (so to speak) to wandering along the coastal regions, learning to eat shellfish and seaweed, and even how to swim and dive, and changing to the Beach Monkey. This might be when we became the Naked Ape.

Technically, we never lost our hairy monkey pelts. A human being has exactly the same number of hair follicles as a chimpanzee. The hairs simply got shorter and thinner, till we became functionally hairless as composed to nearly all of our mammalian cousins.

The end result is sort of the same, but in terms of evolution, it’s a much shorter route between “thick hairy pelt” and “pelt with thin sort of useless hairs” than one leading to “pelt with no hairs at all”.

So we wandered up the African coast, living a very easy and relaxed life as Beach Monkeys, with a plentiful food supply and no predators at all. I’m convinced that this stage of our development is why we consistently consider beaches to be a form of Paradise, and why human beings the world over flock to the beach when we want to relax and be at ease. We have a deep memory that tells us the beach represents an easier, more relaxed, safer place.

Because after the beach came the plains of the Serengeti, where there were no trees to climb, plenty of highly advanced predators like wolves and lions, and no large amounts of easy food just laying around waiting for us to come eat it like an endless seafood buffet. Suddenly and tragically, we had to work for a living.

And I imagine those early Serengeti explorers retreated back to the ease of the beach quite often at first, only making brief sorties into the plains to scavenge. But population pressure pushed us futher onto those vast plains, and we had to adapt from our Beach Monkey selves into the Hunting Monkey. Social organization, which up until this point had been fairly loose, with the leader’s only job being to decide where the troupe went next, had to become much tighter and more complexly hierarchical. We had to become pack hunters, like the wolves, and develop our tool-using skills and higher reasoning skills to a razor’s edge.

We also had to become monogamous. Previously, we were hareming animals, with dominant males dividing up the females between them and all others taking whatever they could get when they could get it. But as we evolved more complex social structures (and more complex social brains to go with them), and as all the makes began having to band together and “go to work” (in other words, hunt), a more egalitarian setup was needed, because you don’t get tightly coordinated groups of hunters who function as a group in a tyrannical harem based system. In that sense, this is where we invented equality. One mate per Hunting Monkey. We became a pair-bonding species.

But it’s worth noting that this, like all our Hutning Monkey adaptations, is an evolutionarily recent add on, and thus we can, in certain times and places where resources are scarce and/or a lot of the males have died, revert to our harem gathering programming, and hence, you get polygamous cultures. If you live in a society where women need men to survive, then to let women die merely because their husband has died would be cruel. Polygamy, in that context, is downright humane.

So we became the Hunting Ape, and thus, became the first true human beings, and developed hunter-gatherer society. And that was stable for quite a while. We didn’t truly become what we are now, the Civilization Building Ape, until we ventured off the plains and their low population density supporting resource structure, and found richer climates where we could stop being nomadic hunters that followed the prey around, and could stay in one place, build homes, and invent agriculture.

Agriculture, presumably, started off as simply hanging around the places where you had found a good food supply. An advanced hunter-gatherer group could establish a central base of operations in an area where there was always something to go find and eat, something in blood or migrating into the area. Then, they would still be slightly nomadic as they wandered the general area between food sources, but they would always bring that food back to their central location, where it could be stored and defended.

But eventually, we clever monkeys figured out the connection between seeds and plants, and what plants grew more food and why, and started doing basic things like weeding berry bushes and clearing brush from around fruit bearing trees. But then someone got the bright idea “Wait, if the plants come from seeds in the dirt, why don’t we just put the seeds in the dirt ourselves?”

Bingo, you got agriculture. And with agriculture, villages, division of labour, specialization, greater ties to the land and the seasons, food storage…. and war.

Because the thing is, once you get really good at the agriculture and animal husbandry (another bright person going “Why don’t we just make the animals we eat stay here?”), you don’t need hunters any more. But we’re still the Hunting Ape, even if we’ve learned to play the civilization game. And you also have a lot of surplus population because you’ve improved food generation efficiency so much. And throughout our history, when human beings have been overpopulated, we went off exploring for someplace new.

But what if there’s already other groups of humans all around you? You can’t feed your entire population. Your instincts are telling you to go out and hunt for food. Those other humans have food, and they are not of your clan (or village or whatever). And you have a lot of strong young men who naturally band together to form hunter groups and fight as a unit to take down prey.

From that point of view, war is inevitable. The same instincts that make inner city youths form gangs and battle for territory makes those Farmer Apes form armies, develop the role of the warrior (as opposed to the hunter), and go to war with one another.

Agriculture leads directly to war. When Europeans came to North America, most of the tribes were hunter-gathers and knew nothing of war. They would skirmish with each other more or less just for the hell of it, because young men need challenge and competition, but the idea of real war, where both sides try their best to kill or capture the other side and take their stuff as pillage, was unknown to them.

But not to the Cree. The Cree had figures out agriculture, namely maize. Corn. And guess what? They knew all about making war against one another. When you have agriculture, war pays off big time. You defeat your neighbour, take his stored food to feed your hungry people, take over his land, kill or enslave his people and you have real wealth and power. Your clan prospers.

Um. So that’s how I got from “cute little kid molesting a mannequin” to “agriculture leads to war”.

Boy, I hope I can find my way back from here…