Signed by Kushim

Uruk, Sumer
5000 BC 4th Month

My name is Kushim … mine is the first recorded name in human history! There was no other name that can be found as we evolved as homo sapiens.

I lived in Sumer … (this was 7,000 years ago from today). While I always thought we are special and somehow a God created us, it turns out our ancestors are chimpanzees, guerillas, orangutans … and about 10 million years ago, our great grand mother, chimpanzee, had 2 daughters - one became our great grandmother, while the other continued as chimpanzee.

2 million years ago, just as elephants, giraffes and other herds of animals flocked around in the savannahs of Africa, humans also moved around in their herd and were bottom of the food chain. Through evolution, bigger humans disappeared, as bigger ones needed more food and the natural evolution resulted in the current human size.  As homo sapiens evolved, from four legged to two legged homo erectus, we started making use of the other two limbs - hands - and making fire, tools for hunting and learned to cook. 

About 500,000 years ago, variations of home sapiens developed into homo Neanderthal and Denisovans, and migrated to various parts of the planet - Neanderthal to what is now Europe and central Asia and Denisovans to eastern and southern Asia and Australia. This hunter gatherer population was about 20,000 homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago to about a million people now (7,000 years ago).

Overtime, home sapiens improvised their skills to create tools and hunt to get to the top of the food chain. This desire for the supremacy in the food chain, evolved home sapiens brains to think and devise new methods to acquire food. This was the first phase evolution of homo sapiens - cognitive evolution.

Similarly, discoveries have shown that Neanderthal and Denisovans also evolved to create fire, tools and hunt.  About 100,000 years ago, as home sapiens started exploring and went into Europe and Asia, ran into Neanderthal and Denisovans. Some archeologists theorize that interbreeding between home sapiens, Neanderthal and Denisovans, resulted in the modern humans - with some DNA from Neanderthal found in European and Central Asian homo sapiens and Denisovan's DNA is eastern and southern Asian homo sapiens. 

As humans started to hunt and cook with fire, they realized less of them were dying, as the cooking killed germs and they reproduced more… with more children, they needed to be taken care of, thus creating communities. To feed these communities, humans started growing food to augment the hunting and gradually as more food was grown, more communities settled into favorable locations, instead of continuing to roam and hunt.

Human bodies also evolved to suite the changing conditions from hunting and roaming to agriculture. Instead of consuming about 4,000 calories a day, the consumption went down as the amount of work reduced - hands and fingers changed to do agriculture and finer things such as creating cloth.

Why am I writing all this… through times immemorial, stories were told on greatness of some, wickedness of others and sufferings of some others. The belief is story teller lies in the conviction with which the story is told with supporting evidence .. and sometimes, or often times, it could carry the biases of the preacher of the stories. Is this the result of our cognitive evolution, letting us tell stories that we want others to believe in and follow the conclusions? And in the process, do we loose the true story, as time passes? What is the genesis of our evolution, that lets us to be different while sharing common goal of pursuit of happiness? As I ponder the evolution over the next 7,000 years, I submit to you few points for discussion.

Source of this information is from many books, websites, etc.