We Learned How to Build Everything Except a Better World

I have been going down another rabbit hole lately.

The further back into human history I look, the more I question this idea that ancient people were somehow primitive versions of us, slowly waiting for humanity to become intelligent.

They weren't.

Go back more than 7,000 years and look at the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture in what is now Ukraine, Moldova and Romania.

Some of their settlements became enormous for their time. Thousands of structures. Thousands of people living together in communities that existed long before the great pyramids of Egypt and before Sumer reached the heights most of us learned about in school.

Then move farther east toward Russia's Ural Mountains.

Thousands of years later, Bronze Age cultures like Sintashta and Andronovo developed sophisticated communities, metallurgy, trade networks, horses and chariot technology.

But there is something in the Urals that is much older than any of them.

The Shigir Idol.

It is roughly 11,000 years old and is considered the oldest surviving monumental wooden sculpture ever discovered.

Think about that for a minute.

Someone stood there around 11,000 years ago with the tools and knowledge available to them and carved this enormous wooden figure, covering it with faces and geometric markings.

Why?

What did those markings mean?

What story were they telling?

We don't know.

And that is what fascinates me.

When you start looking at ancient pottery, carvings and art from different places and different periods, you begin seeing patterns.

Spirals.

Crosses.

Wheels.

Zigzags.

Swastika-like geometric designs that existed thousands of years before that symbol was stolen and permanently associated in our minds with Nazi Germany.

You find these kinds of patterns on Trypillia pottery. You find geometric designs across Eurasia. Thousands of years later you see spirals and other repeating forms in Celtic art.

That doesn't prove these people were all connected or that a symbol meant the same thing everywhere it appeared.

Sometimes human beings simply discover the same shapes.

But it still makes me wonder.

How old are some of our ideas?

How far were people actually travelling?

How much knowledge moved between communities?

And how much knowledge disappeared without leaving anything behind for us to find?

Then start looking beyond Europe.

Ancient Egypt.

Africa and its many civilizations.

The Maya.

The ancient peoples of the lands we now call Israel and Palestine.

The Haida on Haida Gwaii and the Indigenous civilizations and nations throughout the Americas.

Everywhere human beings went, they observed.

They counted.

They measured.

They farmed.

They hunted and gathered.

They mined.

They built.

They traded.

They navigated.

They studied the sky.

They created art and music.

They developed systems for preserving knowledge through writing, symbols, mathematics, storytelling, ceremony and oral tradition.

They created economies and industries using whatever materials and technologies were available to them.

They weren't stupid.

They were us.

That is something I think we forget when we call ancient people "primitive."

Our brains didn't suddenly become intelligent when somebody invented electricity, the automobile, the computer or the smartphone.

Human beings worked with what they had.

Give someone living 8,000 years ago a modern education and access to modern technology and there is no reason to imagine they would somehow be incapable of understanding our world.

And this is where my rabbit hole started becoming something else entirely.

Because when you study ancient societies, you don't only find human brilliance.

You find human suffering.

There were poor people.

There were sick people.

There were people injured and disabled.

There were elderly people who could no longer provide for themselves.

There were widows.

There were orphans.

There were people displaced by war, famine and disaster.

There were rulers.

There were hierarchies.

There was greed.

There were struggles over land, resources, wealth and power.

There was violence.

There were people with more than they needed while others struggled to survive.

Sound familiar?

Thousands of years later, look at what we have accomplished.

We split the atom.

We walked on the Moon.

We transplant human hearts.

We communicate instantly across the planet.

We can look billions of years into the universe.

We fly through the sky.

We have machines that can see inside the human body.

We carry devices in our pockets containing access to more information than the greatest libraries of the ancient world could ever have held.

And now we are building artificial intelligence.

The technological progress of humanity is absolutely incredible.

But people still sleep outside.

People still go hungry while food is thrown into dumpsters.

People still die because they cannot get what they need.

People struggling with addiction are still treated like they are disposable.

People with disabilities still have to fight simply to participate in society.

Elderly people are still forgotten.

Children still live in poverty.

People still flee war.

And human beings still kill one another over territory, resources, religion, ethnicity, ideology and power.

Some people accumulate more wealth than they could spend in hundreds of lifetimes while another human being sleeps on concrete a few blocks away.

So what exactly do we mean when we call ourselves advanced?

Maybe civilization isn't measured by how tall our buildings are.

Maybe it isn't GDP.

Maybe it isn't how powerful our military is.

Maybe it isn't how many billionaires we create.

Maybe it isn't our highways, smartphones, satellites or artificial intelligence.

Maybe the real measure of civilization is much simpler.

What happens to the person who cannot keep up?

What happens to the widow?

The orphan?

The elderly?

The disabled?

The sick?

The addicted?

The homeless?

The stranger?

What happens to the human being who has nothing we want from them?

That might tell us more about how civilized we really are than anything we have ever built.

We have spent thousands of years learning how to build bigger cities, faster machines and more powerful technologies.

We learned how to cross oceans.

We learned how to fly.

We learned how to leave the planet.

We learned how to look into the beginning of the universe.

We learned how to destroy entire cities with a single weapon.

And somehow we still haven't figured out how to make sure everybody has somewhere safe to sleep and something to eat.

Maybe progress and civilization aren't the same thing.

Because if someone who lived 11,000 years ago could somehow stand in one of our cities today, they would probably be astonished by what human beings have learned to do.

I'm not so sure they would be astonished by how we treat each other.

We learned how to build almost everything.

Maybe it is time we learned how to build a better world.