Yesterday, I was watching a documentary about the oldest surviving wooden fragments ever found while washing dishes. The narrator on the video said something that stayed with me: there should be a Wood Age in our history books, but there isn’t one, simply because wood does not preserve well. There are not enough artifacts. Wood rots. Stone remains.
That single thought opened up something much larger for me.
When we think about history, our understanding is almost entirely built around the first civilizations. Writing. Stone cities. Records. That moment is often treated as the beginning of humanity itself, as if everything before it was just a blur of primitive existence. But the truth is that there is so much more time before that point than after it.
The oldest stone tools we know of are about 3.3 million years old. For a long time, it was believed that only humans could make and use stone tools, but even that idea has been overturned. Anatomically modern humans emerged around 300,000 years ago, which already leaves a vast gap between early humanoids and us that we barely understand. And then there is another enormous gap between modern humans and the first civilizations, which appeared only about 5,000 years ago.
That is hundreds of thousands of years of human existence that we mostly dismiss.
When people imagine those times, they often picture brainless creatures wandering around caves, barely surviving. But that image makes no sense. These were people who survived entirely in nature, without any modern systems backing them up. They could not call for help. They could not rely on infrastructure. If they wanted to move from one island to another, they climbed into a small wooden boat and took the risk. If something went wrong, that was it. No rescue. No helicopters. No second chances.
And yet they thrived for hundreds of thousands of years. If they had not, we would not exist.
They invented tools. First from wood, then stone. Later humans recreated those same tools in copper, iron, and eventually steel. The core ideas did not change. Only the materials did. Human progress, in many ways, has been about replacing tools with more durable versions of themselves.
And now, in our time, we have replaced many tools altogether. We use money instead.
Money is a tool that allows us to outsource almost everything. If your internet breaks, you call your provider and someone appears at your door to fix it. You do not need the skill. You do not need the knowledge. The system handles it for you. In that sense, it feels almost magical.
But that magic has a cost.
If the system fails, we are helpless. If the internet goes down, online banking stops working, electricity goes out, or a storm disrupts infrastructure, entire nations can grind to a halt. You cannot buy food without money. You cannot call for help without a phone. Even if you have rations for a short time, what happens when they run out?
We are no longer equipped to survive on our own.
This makes the contrast with our ancestors even sharper. They depended on community, yes, but they were individually competent in ways most of us are not anymore. And yet we give them almost no credit. We dismiss them because they did not leave stone cities behind.
We define civilization by writing. But even that definition is flawed.
Socrates himself believed that writing would corrupt the mind, that it would weaken memory and diminish true thinking. And yet the only reason we know anything about Socrates is because Plato wrote about him. The great thinker who distrusted writing survives only through writing.
That paradox alone should make us question how we measure intelligence.
Writing preserves ideas, but it also freezes them. It allows power to shape narratives, to rewrite history, to polish facts until they are palatable. Again and again, archaeology has shown us that what we believed for centuries was incomplete or simply wrong.
Take the Vikings as an example. We were taught that they were barbaric, uncivilized savages. But contemporary records from Britain show something very different. Local men complained that Vikings were well groomed, hygienic, and well mannered, and that women preferred them. That part of the story did not survive. What survived was the version written by those who felt threatened by them.
History is always moving. Every year, new discoveries force us to revise what we thought we knew. And yet, despite this, many people still imagine our ancestors as primitive cave dwellers, when the truth is that we do not know who they really were.
What we do know is this: they gave us everything.
They survived where survival was brutal. They adapted without systems. They built the foundations upon which every later invention rests. Without them, there would be no tools, no cities, no writing, no money, no internet, no modern world at all.
And yet we rarely thank them.
I don’t think we are measuring intelligence correctly. We privilege records over resilience, permanence over competence, stone over wood, writing over memory. We erase entire chapters of humanity simply because they did not fossilize well.
But intelligence existed long before writing. Civilization existed long before cities. And survival itself may be the highest form of intelligence there is.
The least we can do is acknowledge that.
And now people (you) give up their intelligence preferring to delegate it to AI.
Nuts.
Dude, what is your problem??
Huh? I'm just stating my opinion as you do yours; I don't think that's so unreasonable.
Of course, you're the person who unfollowed me because you didn't like my opinion of humans relinquishing their "thinking" to AI, so maybe your sense of unreasonable is somewhat different to other people's.
You use and love AI...I don't. I think that's quite acceptable, but you seem to want to create some drama over it and I find that...strange. Another opinion I'm quite within my rights to have.
This article isn’t about AI. It seems you didn’t read it, so there’s nothing to discuss with you. I don't follow small minded people, that's about it
You seem to like throwing insults. Says a lot about you.
I don’t see any insults here. You came in with a hostile comment about AI, even though AI isn’t mentioned anywhere in the article. That says more about your assumptions than my writing. I’m not interested in continuing a conversation that isn’t grounded what I was writing about. Have a good day.
Hello, I hope you're having a nice day.
An observation. You making reference to "not following small minded people" indicates you believe the user to be small minded and in the context you've used it that looks very much like an insult. You might not see that as you believe yourself to be correct in your assessment however from the outside looking in I can see that someone would see your comment as an insult because that's how it also looks to me.
You seem to write nicely however that may be through the use of AI which may have been the cause of you being so triggered by the user's opinion about AI I presume.
Have a lovely day.
Becca 🌷
Indeed, intelligence has been in existence before civilization only that these civilization was a system used to enlarge it into reality more than how it has been, @pauliinasoilu
The case on been a survival is truth and facts
Well put. Civilization didn’t invent intelligence. It just made it visible.
Lots of history may be blurred from our current understanding either it wasn't preserve in a way that could be accessed now or it wasn't just recorded altogether. Our over dependence on things we've created outside in the world for survival and having those tangled together in a complex manner is definitely a cause for concern at least for me. Because it does make us collectively more fragile, less resilience like our ancestors, which seems more bad than good in the grand scheme of things.
I feel the same tension. We’ve gained convenience but lost resilience. It’s not all bad or all good, just very different from how humans survived for most of our history.
Right. It's just different and we now have to adapt to this difference, I personally lean more towards keeping a good portion of that resilience, convenience is kind of boring :)
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