|
Birth of Consciousness
About 100,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens probably moved from being in the middle of the food chain to the top. By this time, they had invented some tools/weapons that gave them the power to hunt and kill large and ferocious animals. Earlier on, they had harnessed fire which was especially useful for converting materials (animal and vegetable) into more edible food as well as into weapons for warding off predators.
Whether the first Homo Sapiens had what we now think of as “consciousness” is not clear, partially because there is no agreement as to what a “consciousness” is nor where it comes from. There have been various ideas amongst different experts in different periods of time as to whether animals or even all living things have some type of consciousness. We, of course, at the present time have no such discussions since all such unnecessary disagreements could lead to some type of stress and we have no stress in our society. We all agree now that we do have something that we call “consciousness” and its source and original construction are not of great importance. However, since consciousness and a relatively complicated verbal language are an intrinsic part of being a Homo Sapiens, I did discuss these things in my thesis. How earlier species of Homos communicated, we have no information about so as to whether they had some type of complicated verbal language, we do not know. When language and consciousness developed sufficiently to allow for fantasy and conjectures about the future is also unclear, but this ability to fantasize probably set homo sapiens apart from most, if not all, other animals. |
|
Baumeister, R. F. (1988). The problem of life’s meaning. In D. M. Buss & N. Cantor (Eds.), Personality psychology: Recent trends and emerging directions (pp. 138-148). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Benedict, R.. (1946), Patterns of Culture. N.Y. Mentor Books. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York: Anchor Books. Bregman, R. (2020), Human Kind. GB. Bloomsbury Publishing Crick, F., (1995). The Astonishing Hypothesis. G.B. Harper Collins University of Chicago Press. Etkin, W., (1971). Social Behavior from Fish to Man. U.S.A. The University of Chicago Press. Gazzangia, M. (2018), The Consciousness Instinct. N.Y. Farrar, Straus and Girous. Meyer, E. (2015). The Culture Map. U.S.A. Perseus Books. Snaprud, P. (2018). Medvetandets Återkomst. Lettland, Natur & Kultur Thurfjell, D. (2020). Granskogsfolk hur naturen blev svenskarnas religion. Stockholm, Norstedts. |