This is the link for part 1.
https://www.evomedindia.com/2021/06/29/a-firmware-upgrade-for-the-human-brain-part-1/
Sometime after we started off with perfecting our projectiles, things started getting hairy on the climate front. It wasn’t greenhouse gases or a nuclear winter. It was one of the many ice ages.
And by some estimates humans went down to 10000 individuals globally, before clawing back from the brink of extinction.
They moved to coastal areas for better climate and access to food from the seas. The resource and food crunch forced them to start trading with other human tribes.
Trade now required humans to start interacting with outgroups. To consider value of things that were traded. To consider the value of objects from a third person perspective.
A successful trade required that one understood what each object meant to the buyer and the seller. It required humans to consider the abundance and scarcity of goods. It required humans to consider more deeply the passage of time and seasons. A longer term perspective was now required to navigate the new landscape that also involved trade and barter. They now had to physically travel longer distances, outside their hunting ranges.
Humans learnt to negotiate. They developed a more solid theory of the mind.
Negotiation makes us human. Trade makes us human. Cooperation makes us human.
Things that we didn’t understand, we talked to each other about. We negotiated new realities. Things we couldn’t do on our own, we sought help from humans outside of our immediate kin group.
We negotiated cooperation. We didn’t act like territorial chimps that killed on sight. For most part.
Scarcity and adversity encouraged cooperation. Not conflict. This is very different from the pop culture idea of every man for himself, dog eat dog world that you’ll see in zombie series. And when humans co-operate, problems get solved quickly.
That doesn’t make for a very long drawn out dramatic multi part series with lots of twists and turns. The problem would be solved in a single episode.
We would problem solve, and move to the next one. We problem solved in groups. Cooperating and trading.
What are you collaborating on? What are you negotiating? Who are you negotiating with? What are you negotiating for? How are you finding common ground? How good are your skills in dialog? How will you refine those skills? How do you know what the other side wants? Will knowing what you want, help you know what the other side wants, better? Isn’t knowing yourself, the easier way to know what someone else wants? You’re not very different from the next human. If you are different, how are you different?
And why?