Sublime

This history of ours has been flowing on strong undercurrents toward what Charles Taylor called “the great unlearning of the languages of transcendence.”5

“They don’t teach them to understand others, they teach them to expect others to understand them,” he said in English. He humphed and said, “Americans.”

Collins reminded me that scientific knowledge can be useful to humankind, but, in and of itself, insufficient in generating life-enhancing knowledges for humankind.

While legends of violent meat-eating Homo sapiens vanquishing tribes of Neanderthals still garner rapt attention at dinner parties, there is little evidence that such events ever took place. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence for the less dramatic assertion that a combination of tools, hunting, gathering, and food-sharing permitted what

It also seems likely that the arrival of Homo sapiens led to the rapid extinction of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe and Asia for around ten thousand years, roughly forty thousand to fifty thousand years ago. The Neanderthals went extinct around forty thousand years ago, but

The unfortunate situation for societies that begin to behave as if knowledge primarily resides in words (images) in a book is that they forget we had words before books, stories before books, and analytic abilities before we had texts. For humankind, words—languages—were never only about us, but signifiers of our rich relationships in a complex and

Anthropological and archaeological evidence indicates that archaic hunter-gatherers were probably animists: they believed that there was no essential gap separating humans from other animals.

Harris quotes a Kpelle father in Liberia: ‘If I am cutting brush, I give him the machete for him to know how to cut brush. If work becomes hard, I’ll show him how to make it easier.’ The deliberate teaching of our young, rather than being a modern perversion of human nature, is part of our biological heritage.

For nearly the entire history of our species, Sapiens lived as foragers.