Building Today’s World

Once they were equipped with the social tools that allowed them to maintain greater connectedness, there was no looking back for our ancestors. They evolved much more complex cultures. Once the planet started to warm up and ice started to melt, humans could start to inhabit more of the land surface. As climate variability diminished and stable vegetation zones and habitats began to form, humans started to settle and become expert at exploiting a certain territory. If a group of families developed the knowledge and skills that allowed them to exploit a territory, there was no benefit in sharing that information with people outside the group. So instead of maintaining connections and sharing, people became tribal and, in many cases, territorial. Over thousands of years, families and tribes interacted and formed alliances, and their alliances broke down. But the general trend was for greater connectedness, increasingly complex cultures, and greater success. The human population grew.