A few days ago, I suddenly felt a question popping up in my mind: Why are we who we are? It might be the strangest question that I’ve dealt with. I’ve googled my question and noticed a 2006 book by Canadian psycholinguist Frank Smith (1928-2020): Ourselves: Why We Are Who We Are. Apparently, my question is less weird than I thought it was.
Last Monday, I noticed a Phys article with a potential answer to my blog title’s question: Humans were apex predators for two million years. It does explain why nearly every animal is afraid of us. The article tries to explain why we are who we are today but not in a convincing way: hunters became farmers and gatherers due to a lack of meat??
Frank Smith uses consciousness and technology to explain why we are who we are. That focus and/or perspective makes sense. Nevertheless, it lacks the arrow of time (my blogs) that was used in the previous paragraph.
Combining both paragraphs creates an almost impossible puzzle: how did humans evolve from apex predators to conscious believers (eg, in art, science, technology)??
The answer is another almost impossible puzzle: the earliest known advanced civilization (ie, Sumerians) believed that contemporary humans were created as a hybrid between Earth’s apex predators and alien conscious “gods” (or cosmonauts, if you prefer).
The aforementioned paragraph may well explain another scientific mystery: the transfer from anatomically modern humans towards behavioural modern humans, which is dated between 50,000 to 150,000 years ago.
That earliest known advanced Sumerian civilization is a puzzle in and of itself. They invented nearly everything that we still use today (eg, calendar, farming, geometry, mathematics, time) but their origin is still a mystery to us. Less of a mystery are Abraham and his descendants, including Jezus, who were (black-headed) Sumerians.
The above is why I love the combination of religion and science. As theoretical physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) stated: “Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.” Together, doubt and faith bring out the best in me.
Giving You the Best That I Got (1988) by Anita Baker
artist, lyrics, video, Wiki-1, Wiki-2, Wiki-3
In Den Beginne (2004) by Bram Vermeulen (1946-2004)
Note: all markings (bold, italic, underlining) by LO unless stated otherwise.
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