Human History Redescribed

Introduction

One of the more remarkable features of the human species in the early twenty-first century is how little the species has come to understand itself. This shortfall has been made all the more obvious by the contrasting way in which the species has, over the last two hundred years or so, gained such an impressive breadth and extraordinary depth of knowledge about the contextual surroundings in which humans live. The laws of motion and gravity. Relativity theory. Quantum mechanics. The theory of evolution. Genetics. The structure of atoms. Electromagnetism. Biochemistry. Five hundred years ago none of these topics were understood to even the slightest degree of sophistication, and yet today each has blossomed into a description that is comprehensive, precise, and abundantly productive. From quark to cosmos, from Big Bang to farthest light-year reach, so thoroughly has recent humanity fathomed the heretofore mysteries of its lived environment that one might reasonably wonder if there can be much of anything left still to be learned (Horgan, 1996).

But what can we say about ourselves? Have we yet to explain the human species, explain it to even the slightest degree of sophistication? This is not an insignificant task, because humanity is, above all else, entirely without precedent, without precedent across the entire reach of the known material world, and without precedent over the exceedingly long course of Earth's biological past. If it were not for recent humanity and its enormously transformative activities, there would not be a single insight into the nature of physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and all the rest—there would not be a universe reflecting back upon itself. Modern humanity has been the sole engine driving a massive, explosive and consequential metamorphosis that can still be witnessed taking place all around us today—taking place in fact at an accelerating pace—and yet we comprehend the fundamental workings of that engine hardly at all.

The essential question that needs to be answered from the events of human history is this: how did this species go from being purely animal not more than a couple hundred thousand years ago, to being the unprecedented collection of creatures we observe today? Going no further back than the twitch of a geo-biological eye, humans were simply animals just like all the other animals, constrained by the laws of evolution and nature, confined inside the chains of survival and procreation, living out the same repetitive existence as did every other beast—eating and drinking, fighting and fleeing, mating and rearing—day after day after day (Klein, 2009). This had been the prescribed course of existence for biological life upon this planet's surface for literally hundreds of millions of years, and had been the prescribed course of existence for humans themselves for many hundreds of thousands of years, so what could have possibly been expected to change?

But change it did.

There are now eight billion humans living on Earth, several orders of magnitude beyond what could be naturally expected (Muttarak & Wilde, 2022). And these humans—still animals, and still engaged in animal behaviors—have supplemented their animal existence (some might say, overwhelmed their animal existence) with a gargantuan array of artificial behaviors that two hundred thousand years ago would have been utterly inconceivable. Talking, writing, dressing, cooking, calculating, driving, flying, sculpting, architecting, farming, shaving, bartending, jaywalking, oboe playing, throwing dice, dancing the Merengue—the list goes on and on. Plus let us take a good look around ourselves. For almost every person reading these words, he or she will find themselves not immersed in a natural setting—as would have been invariably the case two hundred thousand years ago—but instead will find themselves surrounded by a ubiquitous cornucopia of artificial construction, construction influencing every perception and every behavior to the point of relentlessness. From the window of my apartment alone, here is what I can see: a parking lot containing hundreds of automobiles, each composed of parts far too numerous to catalog, each painted in a color of the most bizarre hue, each sporting a license plate comprising the letters and digits of some unorthodox bureaucratic language; and surrounding the parking lot, there are several other buildings, each containing dozens upon dozens of symmetrically arranged rooms, each room chock-full of various gewgaws and accoutrements, such as clocks, books, desks, refrigerators, faucets, hair dryers, laptops, door knobs, salt shakers, ornamental bird cases, slow cookers, fast cookers—the list goes on and on; and interspersed among the parking lot and the buildings there is so much more to see, lines painted across the roads, transformers attached to poles, billboards screaming what to buy, a plastic playground, high tension wires criss-crossing hither and thither, lampposts dotting the asphalted landscape, trash cans, benches, cellphone towers, traffic lights, traffic signs—the list really does go on and on. But what of nature? What of that once ever-present human companion, the vines, the trees, the grasslands, flower-strewn streams, insects buzzing and crawling all around, birds flocking constantly overhead, a gazelle or two hurtling past? What from my window can I see that might be reasonably categorized as natural? The answer of course is that I can see almost nothing of nature, it has been almost entirely eclipsed from view. Some patches of grass here and there, but these have been cut and manicured by the groundskeeper, and a smattering of saplings, most of them brought in for a purpose and most of them planted neatly in rows. And then there is that lovely crescent moon hanging low in the western sky, right next to the blinking lights of a jumbo airplane passing by.

There is nothing normal about a modern scene. There is nothing ordinary about the current situation. The essential question that needs to be answered from the events of human history is this: what the hell has happened here?

And for that matter, what the hell is still happening here?

Three Major Histories

In order for a history to be compelling, it requires two main ingredients:

1. A temporal series of dynamic events; and
2. A structural framework underlying those dynamics.

A broken machine is not going to produce a fruitful history, because nothing will ever change. Neither is it useful to recount the outcomes of a roulette wheel, for although the wheel does provide a temporal series of dynamic events, there is no orderly scheme underlying them. (Similarly, the rote date-and-place memorization rituals found inside many secondary school classrooms provide yet another example of uncompelling history.)

There exist three large-scale chronicles that do fit the above criteria for a compelling history. The first of these is the history of the cosmos (Ratra & Vogeley, 2008), beginning with the Big Bang and its resultant fast and cooling expansion, producing protons, neutrons and electrons, and leading to star formation and then star deaths, the cauldrons out of which were forged the chemical elements, as well as the raw material of countless galaxies and solar systems, including eventually our own. Thus, the narrative of the cosmos unfolds as a series of progressing stages, each shaped precisely via a regimen of underlying laws, such as gravity, the nuclear forces, and thermodynamics. Indeed, of the three major histories, this is the one that appears to be the most thoroughly comprehended, so much so that today's scientists can express an extreme degree of confidence when predicting the universe's ensuing course.

The second major history is that of biological and evolutionary life upon the planet Earth (Gee, 2021), including life's primordial beginnings almost four billion years ago, near underwater sea vents or perhaps in nutrient-rich tidal pools, followed by a more than three-billion-year dominance of the single-celled organisms—the prokaryotes and the eukaryotes—supplemented on occasion by multicellular variants that would eventually open the way, starting around 600 million years ago, to the establishment of big life—the complex types of flora and fauna we can observe on the lands and in the oceans today. This entire timeline, sprinkled liberally with both mass extinctions and adaptive explosions, has not been merely the product of chaos and random chance, but has been guided at every step along the way by the regulative movements of tectonic plates, the governance of meteorological and atmospheric conditions, the dictates of organic chemistry and genetics—all brought together under the unifying principles of Darwin's subversive idea. Earth's evolutionary record tells a rich, variable and structure-filled story, one that biologists and geologists can now outline deeply and accurately, even if the massively disruptive influence of the human epoch has rendered the story's future unpredictable.

Perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, although Earth's overall biological story does produce a compelling history, the narrative of any particular species within that story does not. Asian badgers, western honey bees, common sunflowers, giant armadillos, red maples, Sigillaria alveolaris, brown marmorated stink bugs, swordfish, beef tapeworms, Hallucigenia sparsa—who could be bothered to write the complete history of any of these species, and even if such a chronicle were cobbled together, who would feel the need to read it? The issue here is a lack of dynamics. The events of every species follow essentially the same course. If you know the history of Asian badgers, you in essence know the history of every other animal species—the species emerges into existence due to genetic mutations and various geological, meteorological and other evolutionary pressures, the species then surges and comes to permeate its most fit environment, and then due to further genetic mutations and/or changing contextual conditions, the species transforms into yet another species or otherwise disappears. It is the same story played out again and again, and as if this repetitiveness were not stifling enough, note that the events of each organism within a species—and indeed the events of each organism across every species—are similarly constrained. If you know the history of any particular Asian badger, you essentially know the history of all Asian badgers, as well as the history of every other animal creature—the organism is born or hatched and reared, strives to obtain food, water and sexual mates, endeavors to ward off predators, then sooner or later (usually sooner) loses this struggle and dies. The narrative never deviates in any significant way, but follows religiously the same outline again and again and again. This is perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of biological and evolutionary existence—it is constrictive to an immense degree. The intense battle for survival and procreation, whatever else might be said about it, sentences its subjects to a perceptual and behavioral prison. And if the size and structure of that prison itself has changed dramatically, consequentially and systematically over the last four billion years, the holding cells within that prison, as well as the activities of the prisoners contained, these have changed hardly one iota, since the beginning of biological time.

Remarkably, there has been no exception to these constrictive biological and evolutionary rules…no exception, that is, until around a couple hundred thousand years ago.

The third major history is that of recent humanity. The word recent is necessary, because the genus Homo and its bipedal precursors did not go beyond constrained animal existence for nearly seven million years, a period of time for which human history remained entirely commonplace, and entirely bestial. Therefore, from this sentence on, when I employ the phrase human history, it will be intended as recent human history, the only period of time for which human existence has been noteworthy.

It might be objected that this third history is not large enough in scale to be placed alongside the other two. The history of the cosmos covers the entirety of time and stretches across the immense expanse of the universe. And the history of biological life has lasted for nearly four billion years and has reached almost every corner and crevice of the Earth's surface. But what human history lacks in temporal and spatial expanse, it more than makes up for in explosiveness. Anthropologists remain uncertain exactly when to mark the start of recent human history—two hundred thousand years ago is at best an estimate, it might be somewhat sooner or somewhat later (Sterelny, 2011). But until roughly that time, humans had given almost no evidence of their impending transformation—a limited control of fire perhaps, which does suggest some advancement beyond typical animal abilities. And yet what little advancement there had been must have remained inchoate for quite some time, for it was not until around sixty or seventy thousand years ago (during what is sometimes labeled as the cognitive revolution) that the signs of human change began to be unmistakable, including a growing abundance of extraordinary artifacts—beads, structured weapons, awls to make clothing, bone carvings, cave paintings, etc.—all giving support to the launching of a great migratory expansion, one that would soon conquer nearly the entire Eurasian land mass and would send out initiatory shoots into Australia and the Americas. As astonishing as these activities were, they soon were surpassed by another revolution, the agricultural revolution, beginning in the Fertile Crescent a little more than ten thousand years ago. Spurred by the introduction of domesticated animals and plants, humans began bursting forth an entirely new and ever-growing set of manmade constructions—houses, irrigation trenches, pottery wheels, plows, ships, monuments, papyrus scrolls—and humans began coalescing into ever-larger communities, adhering these communities together with unique and formalized systems of behavior, such as codified laws, money, literature, and religion. By five hundred years ago, the complete human conquest of the terrestrial world, as well as the continuing expansion of human behavior and human invention, these had become stunning to an unparalleled degree, and yet humans were in no way finished, in fact had just barely begun. The scientific revolution introduced yet another round of staggering change and another blanketing plethora of new contraptions: steam engines, railroads, factories, telephones, trucks, radio, television. Almost every artifact I can see from my apartment window embodies a concept that did not exist as recently as a couple hundred years ago, and as if the magnitude of all this unrivaled alteration were not nearly enough, humans now find themselves on the cusp of yet one more revolution, the artificial life revolution, bolstered by microchips, robotics, machine learning, bioengineering, and an entire host of digital, medical and electronic innovation. The pace of human change was astounding enough ten thousand years ago, and became astounding by many more multiples one thousand years ago, and turned astounding exponentially one hundred years ago. I have no words to describe today.

We humans cannot truly appreciate the extraordinary contours of human history, because we have lived so deeply ensconced inside its developing folds. But from any other perspective, human history has all the earmarks of a violent conflagration, one that must be blazing nearly out of control. And as best I can tell, other than perhaps the Big Bang, there has been no equivalent to human history anywhere and at any time within the known universe.

The Broadening Approach to Human History

As the outline of its narrative has expanded over the years, the methodology of human history has needed to broaden as well. During the days of Herodotus and Thucydides, geographical awareness reached not much farther than Mediterranean shores, and temporal familiarity encompassed only a handful of generations. Therefore, the earliest human histories were developed invariably from a local and tribal perspective, focused primarily on communal and present concerns—leaders, rebellions, tyrants, battles, conquests, famine, etc. This approach to human history remained predominant for quite some time, and is still witnessed today in many scholarly and popular offerings. But as human spatial awareness began to extend farther and farther around the globe, and as human temporal familiarity began to reach further and further back in time, the local and tribal perspective and the communal and present concerns began to lose more and more of their relevance. The events were now happening on a much grander scale, and the questions to be answered were becoming appreciably larger in scope. More was going to be needed than just an explanation of why King So-and-so had decided to cower inside his castle, or how General Huffington had managed to so badly blunder the war.

Social history, cultural history, economic history, comparative history, religious history, these began rising to the fore, with a larger and larger swath of the human population being taken into consideration, beyond just the political and military figures. Perhaps the most famous and influential example of these efforts was that of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, with their passionate and analytic account of the struggles of the proletariat. But following this path all the way to its splintered extreme, these days we must deal with a postmodernist frenzy for the study of countless marginalized groups—indigenous histories, ethnic histories, feminist histories, LGBTQ+ histories, disability histories, homeless histories, incarceration histories (another list that goes on and on). Judging by the ineffectualness of these efforts outside academic walls (and even occasionally within), it remains doubtful whether the more challenging questions of human endeavor can be addressed fruitfully in piecemeal (Kaiser, 2020).

More promising and more engaging has been the persistent movement towards considering humanity as a whole, and even further, considering humanity within the entirety of its physical and biological context. By the early twentieth century, the known background of human history reached all the way back to the Archean Eon and stretched as wide as a galaxies-filled universe. H. G. Wells, in his ambitious The Outline of History (Wells, 1920), published shortly after the First World War, demonstrated the possibility and the effectiveness of an all-encompassing approach to human history. The details were not always accurate and were sometimes incomplete, mostly because the science was still young, but over the next one hundred years, corrections would be made and knowledge gaps filled in. Today, an all-encompassing approach to human history has been elevated to an established discipline, recognized primarily through David Christian's project of Big History (Christian, 2018), one that fully embraces the three major historical accounts, that of the cosmos, of biological life, and of humanity. But make no mistake, Big History is a human history, its thorough rendition of the time of the cosmos and of Earth's biological past serving as necessary and informative preamble, highlighting the two paradoxical features that render the human part of the story so beguiling and so unique: one, the events of human history have happened in a near infinitesimal sliver of time, and two, the events of human history have been so transformative as to have divorced this species from its purely animal past and to have brought this species to an awareness of all space and of all time.

Unfortunately, this successful broadening in approach towards the events of human history has not been matched by an equally successful plumbing of human history's depths. We know far more about the >what of human history than we do about the how and why. These barren circumstances are not due to a lack of guessing, the number of hypotheses that have been promoted to explain humanity's transformation constitute an enormous multitude—evolution, collective learning, shared myths, increased brain size, neural reconfiguration, social constructions, cultural thinking, memes, language genes, language instinct, modular minds, guns, germs and steel, and so forth (Bingham, 2000; Baker, 2014; Harari, 2015; Hofman, 2014; Klein, 2002; Gravel-Miguel & Coward, 2024; Finkel & Lamm, 2025; Blackmore, 2001; DeSalle et al., 2026; Pinker, 1994; Kurzban, 2010; Diamond, 1997). But of course the sheer volume alone of these many conjectures betrays that none of them have been convincing. And I would take the criticism a little further than that, for these hypotheses reveal a lack of innovative effort, a collection of ordinary and predictable solutions to what is an atypical and unprecedented phenomenon. Human history falls well outside the norm, so it is not unreasonable to begin searching for some nonconforming answers to its fundamental questions. A deep understanding of human history is going to require more than just a simple falling back upon some shibboleths.

Shibboleths

There are two types of insufficiency in the solutions typically offered to explain the transformative mechanics of human history. The first type of insufficiency is that the characteristics of the offered solution (for instance, evolution) fail to match the characteristics of the problem needing to be solved. The second type of insufficiency is that the offered solution (for instance, collective learning) is presented as an explanation of human history, when in fact it is the characteristic itself that needs to be explained.

It is not surprising that evolution is the first word that comes to mind when attempting to uncover the impetus driving human change. In the biological realm, no idea has been more productive than Darwin's theory regarding natural selection, adaptation, common descent, etc., especially when married to the variety-producing mechanisms of genetics. These concepts have effectively stitched together the many shifting pieces of Earth's long and complex organic narrative, giving that narrative an underlying structure and a logical foundation. And because humans are biological creatures and because humans have clearly been undergoing a significant change, what could be more natural than to assume evolution must once again be somewhere on the scene. But if evolution is the first word that comes to mind when attempting to uncover the impetus driving human change, the second word has to be nonsense.

The problem here is that the characteristics of evolution and the characteristics of recent human history do not match—in fact, they run counter to each other. If anything, recent human history is not so much evolutionary as it is anti-evolutionary—it defies nearly every edict that evolution proclaims. Evolution sees organisms mutate to fit to their prevailing environment, whereas history has seen humans mutate their lived environment to fit to their own needs. Evolution utilizes an element of randomness at its change-producing core, whereas history produces transformations that appear to be purposeful and directed. Evolution plays out over an extremely long and measured expanse of time, whereas human history has unfolded suddenly and at an accelerating pace. Evolution locks its organisms into a perceptual and behavioral stasis, fixating them almost exclusively on the immediate needs of survival and procreation, whereas history has witnessed humans breaking these chains of perceptual and behavioral stasis, opening their senses and their activities to the broad richness of an entire universe. Evolution works to maintain an organic equilibrium, and has done so for nearly four billion years, whereas human history has produced, in a minute fraction of that time, a stunning blow to the balance of nature, now in danger of spiraling completely out of control (Rohde, 2013). Evolution generates predictable and repetitive outcomes for every species and for every organism, whereas human history churns out nothing but unprecedented events.

If the changes of human history were biological and natural, then evolution would make for a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to describe what has been going on. But the changes of human history are not biological or natural at all, the changes of human history have been entirely artificial. In the first place, there is zero evidence that today's humans are physically different in any essential way from what they were two hundred thousand years ago. Despite all the popular conjecture, no language genes have ever been identified, no neural reconfiguration has ever been isolated, and no significant organic alteration of any particular kind has been elucidated in any detail. The logical conclusion to be drawn—which by the way, fits far more cleanly to the glacially slow logistics of evolution—is that for all practical purposes, today's average Homo sapiens individual is biologically indistinguishable from the average Homo sapiens individual to be found at human history's dawn. Furthermore, we can observe quite easily with our very own eyes (no postdoctoral degree required, no government funding needed) that the changes of human history are overwhelmingly artificial, and not natural. When from my apartment window I observe another human walking through the massively synthetic scene, I indeed see a creature that is starkly and fundamentally different from the type of creature I might have observed walking across the African savanna two hundred thousand years ago, but note this, every single one of those differences is a constructed difference. The parking lot wanderer is not naked, is not searching for nuts and berries, is not reeking of sweat, urine and excrement, and is not engaging in wanton sex, even though all these possibilities remain entirely available. Instead, this animal creature is clothed, tattooed, wearing ornamental jewelry, shaved, coiffed, bathed, manicured, perfumed, etc., and this animal creature is mumbling to itself, humming a tune, checking on its phone, fumbling with its keys, and soon enough this animal creature will drive off in its car, will obey the painted lines and the traffic lights on the way home, will park in a garage, will sleep on a mattress, will awaken to an alarm clock, will pull a juice container from the refrigerator, will cook oatmeal on the stove, will eat with forks, spoons and knives, will plan a trip on its new computer, and will fly off to Hawaii for some much-needed R&R. Not a single one of these behaviors could be described as natural, and not a single one of these behaviors could have been observed two hundred thousand years ago. Evolution makes for an excellent explanation of biological and natural change, but evolution has nothing to do with human history.

What about cultural evolution, the university denizens will object. What about evolutionary psychology? What about memetics? What about the many scholarly attempts to explain the changing course of human history not with biological evolution, but instead with the application of evolutionary processes to the cultural, social, technological and other non-organic domains? I am not certain I actually need to make answer to these distortions of evolutionary theory, other than to point out the foolishness of pounding square pegs into round holes, but let me highlight a few items to consider. One, the biological form of evolutionary theory possesses a mountain of tangible evidence, whereas the offshoot forms of evolutionary theory rely upon statistical models, theorizing and just-so stories (Richerson & Boyd, 2005), the scientific equivalent of pixies and fairy dust. Two, biological evolution makes meaningful and observable use of genes, nature's chemical carriers of both replication and random variation, whereas cultural evolution resorts to the concepts of memes or other speculated forms of replication, unobserved, unspecified and ethereal entities that appear to have been suggested for convenience and appear to be anything but random (Brodie, 1996). Three, in order to make their alternative forms of evolutionary theory fit to the accelerating contours of human history, academicians have mostly severed their alternative evolutionary characteristics from the characteristics of biological evolution: biological evolution is slow, whereas cultural evolution can be incredibly fast; biological evolution depends upon the surrounding environment, whereas cultural evolution depends upon ideas and brains; biological evolution drifts chaotically, whereas cultural evolution steadily advances; biological evolution is applicable to every species, whereas cultural evolution remains privileged to human society alone.

Like all changes associated with human history, cultural, social and technological changes are artificial changes, and artificial changes possess a myriad of possible underlying mechanisms. Evolution is but one of these possible underlying mechanisms, and in almost every circumstance, it is not the correct choice. A chess game, for instance, undergoes many alterations as the pieces are moved about the board, but who would think it logical or helpful to apply evolutionary processes to explain such alterations. A chess game does not evolve. Neither does human history.

I am of course not the first person to make such statements. There are many historians, scientists and other academicians who recognize that the slow-moving, natural and random features of evolution make for an extremely poor fit to the accelerating, constructed and purposeful variations produced by human history. But having successfully avoided the fallacy of the golden hammer, far too many of these historians, scientists and other academicians then fall victim to a different kind of mistake, that of confusing cause and effect. This can be witnessed in a variety of statements plastered throughout both the scholarly and popular literature. For instance, it is often said that humans have progressed to their current circumstances due to their superior intelligence, or that humans have shed their animal past by leveraging the power of language, or that humans have mastered their surroundings by engaging in collective learning, or that humans have achieved behavioral modernity via advanced social structures, shared myths, and the accumulative transmission of cultural knowledge from generation to generation. I would not argue against the importance of any of these concepts for a thorough understanding of human history—intelligence, language, collective learning, advanced social structures, and all the rest, these are key elements of any cogent description of human transformation, they are the milestone markers along the highway of human change. But what I would argue against is the notion that any of these concepts is capable of explaining itself. These are not the causes of human history, these are simply its effects. These are not the explanations of human change, these are the changes that need to be explained.

Two hundred thousand years ago, humans were simply animals, no less and no more. They possessed the same general characteristics as did all the other animals. Therefore, two hundred thousand years ago, there was no intelligence, there was no language, no collective learning, no advanced social structures, no shared myths, no accumulative cultural transmission, etc., and it had been that way for millions of years. Exactly what is being suggested when one uses one of these concepts to explicate the unique events of human history, that this concept just somehow magically appeared out of thin air and from it everything else then followed? How convenient.

Consider collective learning, the ability to share, store, accumulate, and pass along information from generation to generation, the preferred solution within the discipline of Big History for explaining how humans progressed from being unremarkable primates to being unquestioned masters of the modern world (Christian, 2023). Tell me, how is collective learning supposed to work without some communicative conventions already in place, without a degree of sophisticated temporal and spatial awareness, without a prior methodology of generational permanence, and without a broadened perception for the surrounding environment that goes well beyond that which is required for survival and procreation alone? Try to imagine another wild animal species spontaneously breaking out in a fit of collective learning. Has anyone witnessed some beavers of late gathering to share the newest in dam building techniques? Who has witnessed a pack of lions comparing maps of gazelle migration patterns and then passing along the more promising routes to the kids? Collective learning already presupposes an entire layer of intricate and established technique, and therefore it is absurd to think that collective learning will just spontaneously emerge. The same is true for language, for advanced social structures, for shared myths, etc. (and I will have more to say about intelligence later on).

The question to be asked is not which of these concepts explains the rest, or which of these concepts is the most fundamental force driving human history. The question to be asked is how is it possible that any of these concepts exist at all. They did not exist throughout Earth's long biological past, and did not exist anywhere else within the entire animal kingdom, and did not exist in humans themselves for a very long period of time. How did humanity ever manage to cross that enormous divide, from possessing none of these productive concepts to soon possessing a plethora of them? We might not yet know the answer, but the one thing we can say for certain is that none of these concepts is capable of explaining itself. If we are looking for the root cause of human history, if we are seeking a fundamental driving force, we are going to have dig much deeper, and perhaps dig in an unusual place.

A History of Artificial Construction

In order to avoid speculation and to concentrate only on observable facts, the discipline of human history needs to address more thoroughly the notion of artificial construction. Artificial construction is straightforward to define: it consists of every feature found within the human environment that owes its existence to fabrication and design; that is to say, all the features that have not arisen naturally. As has been suggested, for most twenty-first century humans, their world has become a ubiquitous ocean of artificial construction—it actually takes some effort these days to find an environmental entity that is purely natural. (And do not be fooled and ask something like, what about the surrounding air? If you are currently situated inside a heated or air-conditioned room, the substance you are breathing is not exactly natural. And do not be further fooled and ask, like the academicians, what about language? Listen to a spoken four-consonant adjective, stare at a sentence typeset upon the page, contemplate a blaring horn at a roundabout, and analyze a smiling emoji—what is natural about any of these things?)

The course of artificial construction mirrors precisely the course of human history. Before the start of recent human history, there was no artificial construction of any kind at all to be found within the environment—humanity's surroundings were entirely natural, as had been the case for millions of years. And when human history did finally begin, it was heralded by an infusion of unprecedented artifacts (Zilhão, 2007). Speculate all you like about language genes and neural reconfigurations, the only tangible evidence pointing to the advent of human history is a list of items pulled mostly from the dirt: fire pits, structured bone tools, ochre pigment kits, shell bead jewelry, figurines, etc. And as human history has progressed, becoming ever more eventful and ever more complex, human artifacts have kept perfect pace, growing ever larger in number and ever greater in intricacy. Today, as human history continues to accelerate at breakneck speed and with unparalleled variety, artificial construction continues to accumulate by leaps and bounds and with unheard-of innovation (Rani & Bhardwaj, 2025). By the type of evidence we can actually hold in our own hands and see with our own eyes, human history and artificial construction are intimately linked. Therefore, a thorough chronicle of artificial construction, covering the development and the influence of items ranging all the way from animal skin clothing to the latest in quantum computing, would make for an informative endeavor, and unlike the histories focused on politics, economics, religion, and the like, a history of artificial construction would be applicable and foundational to the entirety of humankind. Only King Louis and his pals were directly influenced by the festivities at Versailles, and only the proletariat suffered firsthand the hardships of the Industrial Revolution, but nearly every human being who has lived during the past many millennia has come under the immediate and constant influence of artificial construction.

There are two core aspects to be highlighted in any account of artificial construction:

1. The physical presence of the artifacts themselves, including their relative permanence and their embodiment of distinctive structural features—symmetry, patterns, repetition, number, form, and so on.
2. The significant and unrelenting influence of these artifacts upon human perception and human behavior.

A human artifact carries information via the embodiment of its underlying structure (Hilpinen, 2018), and is often capable of conveying that information across generations. This is in stark contrast to the intense immediacy of the world of survival and procreation, where almost nothing has lasting influence beyond the here and now, where nearly every piece of information is based upon biology and biological actions, and is therefore generationally ephemeral. It was noted previously that for something like collective learning to be possible at all, there would need to be some supporting and exceptional features already in place, such as a means of generational permanence and a modicum of awareness for space and time. A human artifact fits this bill. Although not necessarily built or arranged to last forever, most forms of artificial construction can easily outlive biology, and thereby establish a means for some generational permanence. And although not always associated with space and time as directly as something like a map or a calendar, most constructed artifacts, via their embodiment of features such as symmetry and repetition, at the very least hint at the elements upon which space and time are based. The presence of artificial construction expands the human spatial and temporal context—as is evidenced in overwhelming abundance today—and it was only when artificial construction began to appear within the human landscape that immediacy relinquished its relentless hold upon the species, opening a pathway to continuous and accumulating change.

In consequence, human perception and human behavior were never the same again. Before approximately two hundred thousand years ago, humans perceived only their natural surroundings, because of course there was nothing else to be seen, and human behavior responded accordingly, remaining locked inside the immediate and repetitive activities of survival and procreation, remaining confined to the same evolutionarily determined pursuits, day after day after day. The perceptual and behavioral changes would have been slow and subtle at first, due to the small amount of artificial construction being introduced, but even then the distinction was notable and significant. Fire pits and clothing expanded the range of where humans could live, sparking a massive geographical migration (Gilligan, 2010; Scott et al., 2016). Structured weapons altered what humans could hunt, greatly modifying territorial and dietary routines (Ben-Dor & Barkai, 2023). And ornamental jewelry, bone sculptures, cave paintings and the like, these brought with them a palpable manifestation of number, geometry, representation, etc., foundational steps on the road to using abstract language (Bentz & Dutkiewicz, 2026). And due to their durability, the number and type of human artifacts continued to accumulate within the environment, increasing their influence across the entire population. By the time of the agricultural revolution and its sudden explosion of new implements and contrivances—huts, farming tools, fences, pottery, etc.—human behavior, determined ever more frequently by these burgeoning devices, was already finding itself far removed from the species' purely animal past.

And of course it is not even necessary to rely upon the evidence of earlier ages in order to acknowledge the tremendous impact artificial construction has had upon human perception and human behavior—we can observe that impact all around us today. The number of unnatural ways in which humans now perceive their surrounding world has become legion: spectacles, hearing aids, radio, television, yardsticks, stopwatches, binoculars, infrared cameras, etc. Even something as modernly mundane as riding in a passenger automobile has had enormous influence on human perception, because who before the twentieth century could have regularly experienced a landscape whizzing past at sixty plus miles per hour, who was regularly exposed to so much visual information in such a very short period of time? These new and expanding perceptual influences, along with the constant exposure to a growing deluge of state-of-the-art constructions, these have rendered human behavior today nearly unrecognizable from any of the species' former times. Flying, photocopying, texting, golfing, ordering flip-flops online—remember, the list goes on and on. Even those behaviors that might be deemed ancient and biological in their origin—eating, drinking, mating, birthing, rearing, etc.—these are accomplished these days almost invariably with the transforming accompaniment of an unending assortment of synthetic aids—silverware, plumbing, dating apps, epidurals, diapers, etc. The dynamics underlying how artificial construction altered human behavior at the dawn of human history, those very same dynamics are in evidence all around us today, the only difference being that today's events happen far more often and far more swiftly, so often and so swiftly that we barely have time to notice.

And this perhaps constitutes the ultimate irony regarding artificial construction, that it has now become so intertwined into human experience it is easily taken for granted and often overlooked—like water to a fish, like air to a bird—and what humans today take to be “natural” is simply the ever-present collection of their artificial experiences. Drop a modern human naked and without implement into a remote African jungle, and he or she will almost certainly be at wit's end, even though this is exactly the circumstance for which he or she was evolutionarily built; but drop that same person into the middle of Manhattan with just a credit card and a robe, and life will go on with barely a hiccup, as though having been fashioned for just this occasion. Indeed, to understand just how fundamental artificial construction is to modern human experience and to recent human history, imagine what would happen if all the artificial construction were somehow suddenly removed from the entire planet. Every car, every word, every stove, every dentist's chair—all of it, completely gone. And then next, suppress every human behavior that owes its existence to these removed artifacts—no driving, no talking, no cooking, no filling of cavities—not a single fabricated activity to be witnessed anywhere one looks. Ask yourself, what would then remain? The answer to this question is exceedingly simple, it is a scenario that has already been described within this essay, already been experienced by Homo sapiens individuals. It is the same scenario that existed approximately two hundred thousand years ago, when humans lived in an entirely biological setting, when humans perceived nothing but their natural surroundings, when humans engaged in the same survival-and-procreative behaviors as did all the other beasts. Artificial construction is the core difference—it is the historical difference—between the humans of a purely animal past and the humans that have produced all the unprecedented events that have happened ever since.

The histories of politics, economics, wars, nations, indigenous peoples, etc., these can indeed be informative, instructive, engaging, and usually worthwhile, but they are not fundamental histories. They cannot ultimately explain what has happened to the human species over the last two hundred thousand years, and they cannot elucidate what is still happening to the species today, and they do not have direct relevance to the entire population. These other histories exist atop a more basic underlying dynamic structure, one that is almost never acknowledged and one that is too easily overlooked. Such shortsightedness can no longer be tolerated. The migration out of Africa, the coalescing of the Mesopotamian civilization, the Punic wars, the rise of Islam, European colonization, the landing on the moon—none of these events would have been possible without the widespread and accumulating existence of artificial construction, and none of these events are entirely understandable without reference to the nonstop and universal human engagement with synthetic and formal features in the surrounding environment. As will be discussed shortly, artificial construction is not the cause of human history, but it is the core element of human change, the fundamental distinction between the humans of today and the humans of a purely animal past. As such, artificial construction undergirds every single moment of human history.

The Inherent Tension

The one deficiency of the previous section is that artificial construction is not the only core element underlying recent human history. It is the core element of human change, but there is another fundamental feature that inherently serves to resist and to counteract this change. It is the same fundamental feature that has been there all along, predating artificial construction by literally millions of years. Despite all the environmental upheavals of the last two hundred thousand years, and despite the countless alterations to human perception and human behavior prompted by artificial construction, humans are still biological creatures, they still have biological urges and drives, and they still act as biological beasts. And as we have determined from the characteristics of biology and evolution, animals are not at all predisposed to change. Therefore, in any foundational description of human history—a description capable of characterizing the basic dynamics underlying every consequential event and of possessing direct application to the entire population—there will be three core factors that need to be addressed:

1. humanity's animal nature;
2. the accumulating impact of artificial construction;
3. the inherent tension between the two.

This ongoing tension between humanity's animal nature and the accumulating impact of artificial construction is of course inevitable, because these two influences have differing characteristics, differing backgrounds, and differing objectives. Biology tends to be conservative, restrictive, and confined to the here and now, essential components in the service of survival and procreation. Artificial construction is prone to being progressive, emancipative, and spatially and temporally diffuse, the ingredients of profound change and the requisite antidote to evolutionary limitation. The push and pull from these two factors pervades nearly every critical juncture along the human historical path, from local skirmishes over scarce resources to the global cooperation of widespread trade, from the iron-fisted rule of family dynasties to uprisings for universal rights, from the savageness of sexual and territorial conquest to the binding pacts of communities and nations, from the barbarous suppressions of the Inquisition to the daring replies of scientific pioneers. Always a force tending backwards, towards the stability, the certainty, the immediate power of a familiar animal past, and always a force pushing forwards, towards growth, variation, and the expanding reward of an anticipated future.

One of the more fascinating aspects of this inherent tension is that it has been chronologically imbalanced, with one of its constituents going from being completely dominant to being nearly dominated by the other. For the longest period of time, there was of course only humanity's animal nature, and when artificial construction did finally appear within the human environment, its first daunting challenge would have been to retain its minimal foothold. The relative permanence of artificial construction certainly helps in this task, but the quintessentially effective strategy has been for artificial construction to first guise itself as the solution to humanity's basic biological demands. Over the many years, how many innovations have taken hold initially by being seen as beneficial to the species' survival-and-procreative prospects, and how many artifacts have achieved their popularity by appealing first to the species' corporeal needs? Fire, clothing and structured weapons, for instance, would have clearly boosted a population's continuance, and therefore been readily accepted despite the initial strangeness. And the majority of ancient artwork, its structure and technique quite unlike anything witnessed before, managed to make its way into the glad clutches of most ancient humans by being often sexual in representation and purpose (Høgh-Olesen, 2025), an oddly pleasing introduction to geometry and form. (Note, by the way, that this same dynamic can still be observed today, for instance in the rapid adoption of the Internet, a tool designed initially to disseminate scientific and other kinds of academic information, but employed far more frequently by the population at large for the purposes of gossip, scams, and pornography (Kim, 2006).)

It was around the time of the agricultural revolution that the opposing poles of this tension began to equalize. Until that moment, humans were still living the lives of hunter-gatherers, and their gradually transforming experiences could still be characterized as being primarily brutish and primitive. But with the development of domestication and with the subsequent budding of civilizations, any bestial portrayal of the human species could no longer be held as mostly true. Humans living in houses. Humans traveling on ships. Humans writing things down. And no longer did every innovation need to justify itself by first appealing to basic biological wants. Monuments, money, music, theater, schools—what immediate bodily need did any of these elaborate constructions fulfill? But make no mistake, humanity's animal nature was still very much on extravagant display. Wars, conquests, slavery, pillage, rape, murder, rebellion, gladiatorial contests, palace intrigue, human sacrifice, animal slaughter—the constant echos and frequent reminders of a once savage and tribal existence. Always steps being taken to go forward; always steps being taken to head back.

But persistently, more steps forward than back—artificial construction began to prevail.

With the coming of the scientific revolution, and still accelerating all the way through the present day, artificial construction has become the increasingly dominant influence in nearly every human endeavor. There are very few places left on the surface of this entire planet that have not been significantly transformed by human hands—in some cases, transformed beyond recognition—and there are very few humans within the extant population whose behaviors are guided more frequently by their inner animal instincts than by the structural features accumulating all around. Yes, there are still wars, still self-serving grabs for limited resources, still jealous squabbles everywhere one looks, and there are still newborn babies being caressed by their mothers. It is accurate to say that humanity's animal nature has not actually gone anywhere at all, it still courses passionately through modern human veins. But it also accurate to say that humanity's animal nature is no longer an equal match for a much larger and constantly expanding rival. Humankind has been mostly overrun by artificial construction, and to see this, we need only take a good look at our own activities: we drive because there are cars on the street, we shave because there are razors in the cabinet, we read because there are books on the shelf, and we find ourselves engaging in such behaviors for the vast majority of our time. By the evidence of simple observation alone, humans can now be described as less the product of their biology than they are the product of their fabricated surroundings.

There have been those who have cautioned against this trajectory. For instance, Nietzsche's major beef with western civilization was that it was draining humanity of its animal vitality, suffocating the species' natural energies under a cascade of bureaucracy, commercial interests and moral imperatives, all major constituents of artificial construction (Nietzsche, 2013). And indeed it is now an open question, what with machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence very much a reality, with robotics, with genetic engineering, with cybernetics and other forms of biological manipulation, and with the prospect of further technologies yet to come, is artificial construction on the verge of replacing biology entirely (See et al., 2025), will artificial construction become the sole survivor of the inherent tension? This is not the time or the circumstance to debate and to decide such matters, but at the very least, we must give an overdue recognition to the rapidly encroaching influence artificial construction has had—and continues to have—on human experience and human history. From the beginnings of behavioral modernity, and increasing inexorably all the way through the present day, artificial construction has been reshaping Homo sapiens in a manner quite unlike anything that has happened before, changing the species in the most profound of ways and for an unknown purpose, with continuing uncertainty as to whether the ultimate outcome will be for good or for bad.

What Does Intelligence Have To Do With It?

After evolution, intelligence is probably the next most popular reason given to explain humanity's rapid transformation from wild animal to modern citizen. The idea usually expressed is that the human brain, perhaps by becoming larger, perhaps by becoming neurologically rearranged, perhaps by…well, the details do get a bit fuzzy here…but by some sufficient means, the human brain around a couple hundred thousand years ago began cranking out the words, numbers, logic, etc. that put Homo sapiens on its current progressive path. Or to sum the matter up in a conspicuously non-specific sentence, we owe our modern activities to the abilities of our superior human brain.

It should come as little surprise that there are a number of problems with this line of thinking, problems that go beyond just its fuzziness. The biggest issue is that such a cerebral transformation is biologically and evolutionarily implausible. Never mind the enormity of the genetic and neural alteration that would need to be involved (Toga & Thompson, 2005)—certainly more enormous than anything that has evolutionarily gone before—just consider the timeline alone. Is it being suggested that a mere two hundred thousand years ago, the human brain did not have the capacity for calculus, chemistry, quantum theory, critical thinking, etc., and then what, it suddenly did, and across the entire population? What kind of evolutionary mechanism works in this way? Or maybe that is not quite the scenario being offered, that instead, the cerebral transformations have occurred more gradually, with the first genetic/neural changes allowing for the ability to control fire and wear clothing, giving the warmer people a massive selective advantage and leading to the sudden extinction of everybody else. Later mutations then gave the human brain the ability to domesticate animals and to build permanent shelter, with those fortunate few receiving such neural upgrades rapidly killing off all their unhoused neighbors. Finally, the most recent transformations have produced neurons capable of performing multi-equation vector analysis, wave-dynamic physics, and Turing machine instruction, meaning of course that the eight billion people still managing to survive on this planet must all be MIT graduates. Or is that not exactly the lesson to be learned from eighth-grade science class (McGraw-Hill Education, 2011)?

There is no plausible biological avenue from the animal-brained humans of two hundred thousand years ago to the supposedly super-brained humans of today. In fact, there is no logical reason at all to assume that the Homo sapiens brains of two hundred thousand years ago were different in any significant way from the Homo sapiens brains working right now, the earlier lack of calculus, chemistry, quantum theory, critical thinking, etc. notwithstanding. If the humans of today are intelligent—and indeed they are, in a way that no pure animal has ever managed to be—they did not gain that intelligence organically.

The thing is, intelligence is a vital concept for achieving a fundamental understanding of recent human history, but only when intelligence is correctly described. There is a different way of looking at intelligence, a way that does not define it as being merely the product of dendrites and axons. Although this alternative view of intelligence certainly runs counter to prevailing opinion (Colom et al., 2010), it does possess several advantages that speak in its favor: its characteristics are directly observable via the essential tool for measuring intelligence, the IQ test, its timeline cleanly follows the outline of human history, it remains consistent with the phenomenon known as the Flynn effect, and it does not require any extraordinary (that is to say, implausible) physical alterations within the human skull over a very short period of time.

The key to this alternative description of intelligence is once again artificial construction. When intelligence is portrayed correctly it can be seen as simply a different aspect of the constructed surroundings in which humans now live. The symmetry, patterns, repetition, number, form, etc. that are embodied within the many fabricated objects of artificial construction, along with the differential human behavioral responsiveness to these synthetic features, all this constitutes the material and the operations of what is commonly labeled as human intelligence, and all this constitutes the performance measured when one sits down to take an IQ exam. Take a good look at what an IQ exam consists of (Wechsler, 1997). There is not a single natural element upon it, not one survival-and-procreative capacity being probed. Every single question on every single intelligence test is composed entirely from the elements of artificial construction—digits, words, puzzles, matrices, geometrical patterns, etc. When a human takes an IQ exam, what he or she is being measured for is their ability to accurately and productively interact with artificial construction, the very same type of artificial construction this person will encounter nonstop in their everyday world. The concepts of artificial construction and human intelligence are essentially inseparable.

Approximately two hundred thousand years ago, when there was no artificial construction existing anywhere at all within the human environment, there was also no human intelligence. The humans of back then were displaying the same level of intelligence as were all the other animals, an amount that could be fairly labeled as zero. (For instance, the humans of back then were not capable of answering—or even comprehending—a single question from a modern intelligence exam, the same that can be said of wild animals today.) But the reason for this lack of intelligence was not cerebral. The human brains of that time were essentially the same as the human brains of today, so they certainly had the capacity to display intelligence, but the problem was that they had nothing upon which to employ that capacity. An ability to golf is meaningless if there are no courses to be played, and an ability to interact with artificial construction is also meaningless if there is no artificial construction around. Intelligence does not materialize without the existence of artificial construction.

When artifacts did begin to appear within the human environment, intelligence began to emerge within the species, and since artifacts are generally available to the entire population, intelligence began to emerge universally (no implausibly widespread genetic mutations or cerebral alterations required). To be sure, in addition to the fundamental role being played by artificial construction, there are some neural factors involved with human intelligence, the factors that explain individual intelligence differences, and even in the earliest days of intelligence, these individual differences would have been readily apparent. In the handling of fire, in the crafting and maintenance of structured weapons and tools, in the interpretation of body art, etc., some of the population would have shown themselves as being quite masterful with these newfound artifacts, some would have betrayed themselves as being at a relative loss, and the majority would have revealed abilities falling somewhere in between, the exact same pattern of performance that appears today on modern intelligence exams. This individual capacity is known as general intelligence ability (Gottfredson, 1998), sometimes labeled as g, and since general intelligence ability is determined primarily by neural and genetic factors (Deary et al., 2022; Plomin & von Stumm, 2018), it is biologically and evolutionarily logical to assume that the level and distribution of general intelligence ability within the human population was the same at the dawn of human history as it is right now. That is to say, general intelligence ability, along with the genes and neurons that support it, has not significantly changed over the last two hundred thousand years.

But human intelligence as a whole clearly has changed over the last two hundred thousand years. The humans of two hundred thousand years ago would not have been able to do arithmetic, they would have possessed a vocabulary less extensive and less sophisticated than a modern child's, and they would have recognized only the most basic of patterns presented to them. Today's average human can do algebra, can understand and manipulate tens of thousands of words, and can even manage to navigate a downtown traffic grid. What explains the difference? How do the humans of today display more instances of intelligence before their second cup of coffee than ancient humans did over their entire lifetime? If the difference is not cerebral, then there must be something else driving this enormous and historical growth in human intelligence. And as it happens, that something else is staring us right in the face. The difference in displayed intelligence from ancient humans to the humans of today is the amount and complexity of artificial construction existing within the human environment, an amount and complexity that was practically non-existent two hundred thousand years ago, and is overwhelmingly abundant today.

The above discussion can be captured in an equation:

measurable intelligence = general intelligence ability x artificial construction

Measurable intelligence is the equivalent of the raw score on an intelligence exam, which can be taken as a proxy for the amount of intelligence a person routinely displays within their everyday life. The population's average measurable intelligence would have been zero anytime before the start of human history, would have been extremely low right after the start of human history, and is many orders of magnitude higher today. The form of the equation reveals that measurable intelligence is the combined result of two separate orthogonal factors: one, general intelligence ability, representing biologically driven individual intelligence differences, and two, artificial construction, representing the amount and complexity of fabricated elements to which the population is exposed. At any given moment of time, artificial construction will be roughly the same for every member of the population, and thus, any differences in raw scores on intelligence tests—that is, any differences in measurable intelligence—will be due primarily to differences in general intelligence ability. Smart people will get the high scores, indicating their superior dexterity with the artificial construction all around them, including the artificial construction on the exam, the not-so-smart people will get lower scores, and the majority of the population will fall somewhere in between, performances that will carry over into the circumstances and outcomes of everyday life (Gottfredson, 2002).

But over time, artificial construction does not remain constant. As the number and intricacy of artifacts continues to accumulate within the environment, artificial construction significantly increases. When later generations are assessed for their intelligence, two notable characteristics will be evident. One, the pattern of individual differences will still be the same, that is, there will still be smart people, not-so-smart people, and the majority that fall somewhere in between—the level and distribution of general intelligence ability does not change over time. Two, the overall level of intelligence will increase across the population, because the individual abilities are now being applied against a growing accumulation of artificial construction; that is to say, measurable intelligence increases over time, due entirely to the corresponding increase in artificial construction. This increase in measurable intelligence is easily noticeable across even a small number of generations, and when the interval is as long as two hundred thousand years, the difference becomes stark.

This phenomenon has a name, it is called the Flynn effect. The first intelligence tests were invented and administered early in the twentieth century, and as that century progressed, intelligence researchers began to notice that the raw scores on these tests were significantly increasing over time. James Flynn in the 1980s published two influential papers (Flynn, 1984, 1987) that showed this phenomenon was essentially universal across the population, bringing greater attention to it and providing an inspiration for its name. The Flynn effect has baffled scientists ever since its discovery, because it does not fit cleanly into their brain-specific theories regarding human intelligence (Rodgers, 2023). Therefore, scientists have taken to labeling the Flynn effect as a temporary aberration, one they hope and believe soon will disappear (Dutton et al., 2016; Pietschnig & Gittler, 2015). But the above analysis reveals that the Flynn effect is anything but temporary, that it has been with humanity ever since the start of human history. And since artificial construction continues to accumulate rapidly within the human environment, there is no reason to expect that the Flynn effect will end anytime soon. Scientists actually have no cause to be baffled by the Flynn effect; what they do have cause to be baffled by are their brain-specific assumptions regarding human intelligence.

The lesson to be taken from this section is that human intelligence is indeed a fundamental component underlying human history, but not if intelligence is being thought of as some biologically miraculous neuron-produced activity. Instead, intelligence is a fundamental component underlying human history because intelligence is essentially inseparable from artificial construction, the core element of human change. The progress of human history, the continuous increase in measurable intelligence—these are essentially two different aspects of the same course of events, and as such, they shed light upon each other.

As a side note, it is interesting to contemplate some of the other kinds of “intelligences” that are often tossed about within the psychological literature (Gardner, 1987). Social “intelligence.” Emotional “intelligence.” Bodily-kinesthetic “intelligence.” And so on. I put the word intelligence inside quotations for these alternative concepts because I prefer to reserve that word for the type of ability being measured via an IQ test, which, as has already been described, queries for relative dexterity with various types of artificial construction. That being said, these other so-called intelligences are not without merit or interest, they represent abilities that are often important in individuals' lives. But these other abilities are not directly connected to artificial construction, they are instead associated to that other fundamental human influence, namely humanity's animal nature. And if there were tests available to measure for social, emotional, and bodily-kinesthetic abilities, such tests could have been meaningfully administered to humans well before the start of human history. As pure animals, humans were social creatures, they were emotional creatures, and they made great use of their bodily dynamics—the value of these characteristics would have been critical in those earlier days. And because humans have retained their animal nature through current times, such abilities still play a lingering role in modern human experience. But it also needs to be recognized that these lingering skills have been nearly swamped by the newcomer, that in a world that is being mostly overrun with artificial construction, and in a population thats behaviors are being determined mostly by an endless array of synthetic interaction, no type of intelligence is more important than the standard kind, the kind that measures expertise with artificial construction.

What Does Autism Have To Do With It?

Although artificial construction serves as a core element in any fundamental description of human history, artificial construction cannot serve as human history's cause. It remains unexplained how and why artificial construction even began, and what is it that allows artificial construction to continue, and why is it that it occurs only within the environment of the human species and not within any other. A preliminary answer to these questions leans on a topic that must at first glance seem to be entirely unrelated, perhaps even outrageously so, but this is only because the topic has been so badly misunderstood. The origin of human history, the key to human history's driving force, and the reason for humanity's atypicality is to be found in a more accurate description of the condition known as autism.

Artificial construction is distinguished by its underlying structural features, the pronounced embodiment of such concepts as symmetry, patterns, repetition, number, form, etc. Nature as well contains many instances of these structural concepts, for instance in the regularities of celestial motion and in the gravity-induced shapes of plants and trees. Nonetheless, the biological world never appears to take much notice of these formalistic elements. So compulsory are the demands of survival and procreation that biological perception never gets beyond immediate need. From an organism's sensory field, the only elements that stand out and get attention are instances of food and water, objects of potential danger, possible sexual targets, and so on, and any extraneous scrutiny given to such items as patterns and symmetries will be in most cases evolutionarily unproductive and weeded out. This is why animal existence is so repetitive across every species—every organism is perceiving the exact same class of objects from its surrounding world, and is behaving correspondingly in nearly the exact same way. Biological perception is tightly restricted—there is no extra room for symmetry, patterns, repetition, number, form, etc.

Included within the class of biological perceptual targets are conspecifics, the other members of one's own species; almost every organism possesses a strong perceptual bias for its population brethren and their activities (Lickliter, 1991; Nunes et al., 2020). There is a clear evolutionary reason for this type of perceptual bias, for if an organism did not have a natural tendency to focus upon and to give rapt attention to the other members of its own species—if conspecifics were just some part of the nondescript sensory background—then how likely would it be to stumble upon a sexual mate, how could the correct offspring be tracked and cared for, what would foster pack hunting, and what might support group defense? A perceptual bias for conspecifics is an essential factor in the survival-and-procreative prospects of nearly every species, and is especially apparent in those species that are depicted as being social, including our own.

The reason for my emphasis on conspecific perception is because it is precisely with reference to this notion that autism can be correctly described. Most human individuals (roughly ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent) have a normal experience with conspecific perception, an experience that is readily apparent from the earliest years of life. Non-autistic children give preferred attention to human faces, human voices, human touch, human smells, and non-autistic children are drawn to following human activities and mimicking human behavior (Mottron & Gagnon, 2023). This conspecific bias helps ground the non-autistic's child's sensory world, providing the necessary guidance to determining which items in the sensory field need to be brought to the perceptual foreground, and which items can be ignored. This sensory grounding in turn provides the basis for further developmental progress, with the child following various forms of human lead into more complex encounters with a broader human environment. This is the typical form of sensory and perceptual development, determined in large degree by conspecific bias, and it is as old as biology itself. But because it is as old as biology itself, it is also quite constrictive. Before the start of human history, when humans were still pure animals, typical sensory and perceptual development would have guided human individuals into a typical animal existence—eating and drinking, fighting and fleeing, mating and rearing, day after day after day, with no extra room for symmetry, patterns, repetition, number, form, etc.

Autism is most accurately described as a significant lack of conspecific perception, a clear non-bias for the members of one's own species, a condition experienced today by a little more than one percent of the human population (Mottron et al., 2025). The first indication that a child is likely autistic is his or her diminished attention for and interaction with the human features in the surrounding environment. Non-responsiveness to human voices. Odd sensitivity to human touch. Lack of joint attentive and other shared activities. Whereas the non-autistic child reacts with readiness and glee to nearby humans and their various activities, the autistic child appears to be mostly unaware of everything human around them.

The consequences of a significant lack of conspecific perception are profound. The most basic consequence is that the typical path of sensory and perceptual development is now closed. Since conspecifics and their associated features do not emerge predominantly from an autistic child's sensory field, his or her sensory world will first be experienced as something more akin to an unorganized sensory chaos; that is to say, there will be a significant lack of sensory grounding. No impressions will easily stand out, no sensations will fade naturally into the perceptual background, every sensory element will retain essentially equal sensory footing, with the result often being a mix of assorted sensory difficulties—hypersensitivity, hyposensitivity, synesthesia (Hazen et al., 2014; Kern et al., 2006). If an autistic child gets stuck in this circumstance, his or her developmental prospects will almost certainly be grim, and sadly, there are such cases. But fortunately, there is also an out from this circumstance, and most autistic children, at least to some degree, will take advantage of it, with far-reaching and atypical ramifications for the entire species.

There are two distinct ways to break a sensory chaos. The first way is the time-honored biological way, headlined by conspecific perception, whereby an organism gives perceptual bias to the survival-and-procreative features within its sensory field, including a perceptual bias for the other members of its own species. This approach has a clear evolutionary advantage, but it also comes at a cost, for it restricts an organism's perceptions and behaviors to only those items and activities that have immediate survival-and-procreative consequence, leaving the organism nearly oblivious to everything else. The second way to break a sensory chaos is to rely upon the environment's inherent structure, giving preferred attention to those surrounding features that serve to break the background noise. Concepts such as symmetry, patterns, repetition, number, form, etc., they all have one characteristic in common, they are antithetical to randomness and chaos, they are the contrasts to background noise. And any organism that takes this second path to breaking its sensory chaos will find itself with access to a structural world that has gone untapped by the biological kingdom for nearly four billion years.

An autistic child, cut off from the biological way of overcoming his or her sensory chaos, will do the next best thing, homing in on those inherent structural features that can be found in the surrounding environment. The evidence for this approach can be found in the many atypical activities of autistic children: staring at ceiling fans, repetitive humming, flicking light switches, lining up toys, watching the same video over and over, etc., activities that can be characterized by the prominence of their underlying structural features (Jacques et al., 2018). These so-called repetitive behaviors and interests are not disorders—in fact, just the opposite—and they are not something that needs to be cured. They are instead the necessary attempts to bring organization and grounding to an autistic child's sensory world, and to the extent these attempts are successful, they break the child's sensory chaos and open a door to further developmental progress—not typical developmental progress, but progress nonetheless, progress based not primarily upon the conspecifics around them, but instead upon symmetry, patterns, repetition, number, form, etc.

There is an obvious corollary that arises from this description of autism: human history began when autism gained a significant foothold within the population, providing the necessary means for the development of artificial construction.

Something had to begin the process, and the long unproductive reach of biological time shows that typical perceptions and behaviors are not adequate to the task, that something thoroughly atypical is needed instead, and the natural autistic tendency to focus upon the structural features in the surrounding environment is the key to opening new perceptual and behavioral doors. We do not have enough data to describe in detail how this might have played out in the earliest days, but we can assume that the autistic individuals within the human population would have been taking particular notice of the structural features provided by nature—the symmetries, the regularities—and would have been attempting to recreate these features in various guises, the same way we witness autistic children today repurposing toys and other objects in unusually creative ways. Here would have been the origin of the first artifacts, and although some of these artifacts would have been quickly forgotten and discarded, others would have proven to be quite useful, and not just to autistic individuals. The non-autistic members of the population, naturally inclined to take notice of other humans and of what other humans do, would have found themselves curious about the odd behaviors and unusual constructions they were witnessing. And to the degree that these new behaviors and new constructions served survival-and-procreative purposes, the non-autistic members of the population would have been more than glad to adopt these behaviors and constructions as well, by copying, by promulgating, by improving. Thus would have begun a productive symbiotic relationship between the autistic and non-autistic members of the human population, a relationship that has spawned a continuous increase in the amount of structure contained within the human environment, thereby fueling the events of human history. That symbiotic relationship continues unabated through the present day.

If one knows how to look, the twenty-first century world provides an intriguing laboratory for the observation of autistic and non-autistic influences upon the human species. Non-autistic individuals still receive their developmental start primarily through conspecific bias and interpersonal connection, but in an environment now nearly dominated by artificial construction, non-autistic individuals quickly find that their human companions are leading them ever more frequently into a never-ending relationship with symmetry, patterns, repetition, number, form, etc. That is to say, non-autistic individuals quickly discover what it is like to experience an autistic style of perception, and although this style of perception will not be natural in the biological sense, it will soon become “natural” in a different sense, the sense of being constantly there. Therefore, as adults, non-autistic individuals reflect a provocative blend of two very different sources of influence, the non-autistically themed impact of humanity's animal nature and the autistically themed impact of artificial construction. The push/pull within each individual from these two sources of influence mirrors the push/pull driving the course of events for the entire human species.

At the same time, most autistic individuals today experience these same two influences, especially as adults, having arrived at them through a slower and inverse course of development, but autistic individuals must also suffer through a third kind of influence, one that is proving to be quite detrimental. The recognition of autism beginning in the mid twentieth century can be described in some ways as an unfortunate event. Before then, those autistic individuals achieving a degree of developmental progress (constituting the majority), despite their quirkiness and their relative lack of standard social graces, blended in reasonably well with the rest of the population, their unusual perceptions and behaviors still contributing in ways both big and small to the ongoing accumulation of artificial construction (think for instance of both the atypical personalities and the fundamental innovations behind such names as Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Cantor, Turing, etc. (James, 2003; Snyder, 2004)) But with the overt recognition of autism came also a terrible misunderstanding, the widespread and unevidenced belief that autism is a dire medical condition, one in need of both treatment and cure. More than a half century's worth of research and effort along these lines has proven to be utterly fruitless (Brignell et al., 2018; Myers et al., 2020; Parellada et al., 2023; Sandbank et al., 2020; Whitehouse et al., 2021), but nonetheless, too many autistic children today are being routinely subjected to a stunning array of stifling interventions, everything from stupefying drugs to mindless ABA, all inhibitors to natural autistic development.

Listen, autistic individuals who are in need of extra care should receive extra care, but no autistic individual deserves anything less than full dignity and a correct understanding. Autistic individuals are not sick, they are not disordered, they are not non-autistic individuals trying to get out. Autistic individuals simply are who they are, organisms without a strong perceptual bias for the conspecifics around them. This does leave them evolutionarily vulnerable and it does force them into an alternative and slower course of development, but it has also helped them create a stunning new environment in which these disadvantages mostly disappear. Without the significant presence of autism within the human population, Homo sapiens would still be a pure animal species, would still be utterly bereft of artificial construction, and would still not possess a single ounce of intelligence. To the extent that humanity enjoys the benefits of its current situation, it needs to accept the following fact: autistic individuals are not in need of treatment and cure, they are in need instead of gratitude.

One question that remains unanswered is, why the human species? Why not for instance Asian badgers? There is nothing about a lack of conspecific perceptual bias that is necessarily human, it is reasonable to expect that autistic organisms must appear also from time to time within other species. But it is also clear that autism is evolutionarily disadvantaged, that its characteristics are contradictory to survival-and-procreative prospects, especially under the often brutal conditions of the natural world. It can be hypothesized that over the hundreds of millions of years of previous biological existence, autism never gained a significant foothold within any other species, not significant enough to catalyze the initiation of artificial construction. Therefore, the real question to be asked is, what is it about Homo sapiens that has allowed autism to reach a meaningful and sustainable presence within the population? Admittedly, the picture is rather murky here, but one possibility to consider is that the gestational peculiarities of the species provided special impetus to give extra care to its newborns, including its autistic newborns, thereby allowing an autistic foothold to be gained. Due to their transformation to bipedalism and the resulting narrowing of the female birth canal, humans are born quite early relative to their full gestational needs, and human infants are quite helpless in their first year or two of life (Mitteroecker & Fischer, 2023). This, combined with the fact that humans are born usually just one at a time, means that a great deal of investment is made in each individual before maturity is gained, providing increased motivation to see that investment through. Most animal species produce far more offspring than are needed to sustain their population numbers, with little care being given to help the evolutionarily weaker, including any autistic offspring. The human species on the other hand cannot afford to be so profligate with its next generation, with the result being an unusually protective harboring of all its infants, including those of an autistic bent. We can witness this extra care still being expressed today, with time and effort being doled out as needed for nearly every human child, including those not following a typical developmental course.

That extra time and effort has paid dividends. By supporting a significant presence of autistic individuals within its population, the human species has gained a new perspective upon its surrounding world—a structural perspective—and by taking advantage of the artificial construction this new perspective brings, the species has broken the perceptual and behavioral chains long imposed by biology and evolution.

Conclusion

The history of the human species over the last two hundred thousand years has been an extraordinary occurrence, quite unlike anything witnessed before upon the planet Earth, and it remains an open question whether similar events can take place in other corners of the universe and what that might ultimately mean.

To continue their history and to carve their destiny successfully, humans will need to better understand themselves, and this effort will require greater awareness of the fundamental forces that have been driving human change. The explanations for human history offered to date have not been nearly adequate—they suffer from biological implausibility and from not being germane to the problem at hand, leaving too many essential details unspecified. The alternative description of human history that has been offered within this essay will no doubt sound strange to the early twenty-first century ear—it is after all an atypical solution meant to fit an atypical phenomenon. But this solution does attempt to get at the heart of the matter, and it does specify the key roles played by artificial construction, intelligence, and autism, and it does not rely upon any biological magic.

Having an accurate and deep understanding of human history is important, if for no other reason than this: given the rapidly accelerating pace of historical events, given the rapidly accelerating accumulation of artificial construction, and given the rapidly accelerating performance of human intelligence, the climax of human history is surely upon us soon.

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