Why Forever 21 Is More Human Than Upright Walking--My Thesis of Life, Backed By Science

The preview for Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams has had me thinking a lot about Lascaux.

Humans have been anatomically modern--i.e., normal-looking--for 200,000 years. That is a reeeeaalllly long time.

5,000 years ago, the oldest known pyramids were just a twinkle in some pharaoh's eye. People didn't even know how to domesticate plants until 10,000 years ago. 200,000 years is enough time for life as we know it to come and go twenty times over.

For some reason, humans existed for nearly their whole evolutionary lifespan as anatomically modern without being what we call behaviorally modern. Until around 40,000 years ago, there was no drawing, there was no painting. There was no jewelry. There were no tiny antelopes carved into the handles of hunting tools. There was no material representation of imaginary things. As far as we can tell, there was no form of abstract thought whatsoever.

The latest theory about why humans started doing stuff like having funerals, making elaborate necklaces, and getting tattoos has a lot to do with what happened when a group of H. sapiens migrated from Africa to Europe, and encountered the H. neanderthalensis populations who had already been there for a hella long time. Science had no clue until recently what these two populations did when they met--did they fight each other, did they eat each other, what?

Now, it's genetically evident that they made babies together (if you're not African, you're part Neanderthal--sorry, white supremacists!), and archaeologically evident that they engaged in a whole lot of trade together, too. Neanderthal remains start showing up BEDECKED with H. sapiens-style gewgaws. Both populations' material technology--their stuff--starts to get way more complex, at a way more rapid pace. There's even evidence that this is when spoken language starts to really blow up. In other words, when these two populations encounter each other, they quickly become far more human.

It's here that we start to see places like Lascaux. Cave paintings. Symbolic expressions of human thoughts. A dog can't look at a bunch of lines on a flat surface and see a cow. A human can. A chimpanzee won't bury its mother facing east. A human will. Because of the continuously belittled human abilities of socialization and material attachment, humans became more human than they had been for 160,000 years.

Humans will glorify anatomical details which are not particularly exclusive to us, such as the thumb. But we will marginalize our human obsession with adornment and symbolic materials, even though the presence of these obsessions is actually how we define modern humans as different from humans who were merely anatomically modern.

My conclusion: Forever 21 is more human than upright walking.

Secondary conclusion: I'm going shopping.