![]() ![]() Once upon a time, he wrote, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a state of childlike innocence, as equals. ![]() One of the first people to ask this question in the modern era was the Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in an essay on the origins of social inequality that he submitted to a competition in 1754. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong? Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly - the reasons for war, greed, exploitation and indifference to others’ suffering. This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. We have no way of knowing what most of them were. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during that period. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 B.C. ![]() Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but we have next to no idea what was happening for the majority of that time. Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. ![]()
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