My Talk With our Most Ancient Ancestor
If you brought our most ancient tool-making ancestor to America today, what would they see?
The oldest tool found to date is about 3.3 million years old.
It’s a cheap tool. Simple rock with a sharpened end used for bludgeoning and breaking bones to eat the marrow. (We were a kind of bottom feeder once.)
If I was Marty McFly and I had an unlikely-genius physicist friend I’d bring a couple of those ancient ancestors to the future, suit them up with a grunt-to-speech translator and show them around.
The conversation may go something like this.
Me: hi there Snarl and Black Dick. Welcome to the future.
Snarl: holy shit, your words turn into symbols in my head!
Me: yea, that must be weird for you guys. I want to show you around what we’ve built in the past 3 million years, give you a sense of the progress we’ve made as a species.
Black Dick, masturbating: where’s the chicks?
Me: whoa, BD, we don’t do that in public. You’re supposed to do stuff like that in bathrooms and other places where no one can see you.
Snarl, looking around at buildings: Oh my fucking god — you guys made your own caves!?
Me: Yea, these are buildings and houses. We live in them and work in them.
Snarl: Fucking brilliant. And what’s that on your feet?
Me: These are shoes. They cover our feet…
Snarl: SO YOU DON’T GET STUBBED TOES! Holy Stone Dick I hate stubbed toes. Brilliant.
Me: Yea, we’ve made a lot of progress, a ton of technological advancements so life is a lot more enjoyable now. Oh, here’s a market where we get all the food we need.
Snarl: !
Black Dick: {rubs things on his penis}
{long time spent talking about what money is, not masturbating}
Snarl: So you guys don’t get stubbed toes, you make your own caves and never have to sleep in the rain, there’s NO MORE LIONS and literally NO PREDATORS AT ALL, you get food whenever you want it as long as you have paper in your pocket… you guys must sit around and just screw each others’ brains out all day! Where’s that happen!?
Me: ha! yes, I can see how you would think that, Snarl. No, actually we spend most of our time, you know, working and trying to get more of those papers in our pockets to get more stuff. We don’t just need food now, we all want bigger houses, televisions, there’s these things called iPads now which are pretty much a must have — if you want to know what people are talking about at parties and stuff, you’ve got to read the atlantic and listen to this american life.
So we spend most of our time thinking about that money and career stuff, and when we’re not doing that we’re trying to stay married (which is a lot of work nowadays — turns out men have been total dicks for the last 3 million years; we’re righting that ship now), which kind of gets harder when there’s all these things to watch on TV and you’ve got to work together to pick your Netflix queue. And we pretty much only have sex at bed time… and to be honest, we’re both kind of shot from the day and stress of work. I know we don’t have lions, but emails can be really hard, you guys… really takes it out of you. So, we have these pills that help us, you know, have sex sometimes, but we mostly don’t have a lot of sex. I guess we like other stuff more.
And we have all these kinds of relationships that we tolerate. It’s not normal to hate people, so we all act like we love everyone but we all know we can only love so many people. But we have to make room for everyone in society, which is probably totally against your nature, but it’s something that’s become really important because we have bombs now.
Which is kind of the common string in a lot of things these days: live by your nature and you feel more alive but everyone dies including you, or spend a few hundred generations changing your nature and the species gets to live on. It’s like we all WANT to masturbate whenever we feel like it {nods in Black Dick’s direction} but we also publicly shame anyone who does it. We’re sort of conflicted, and it means a lot of depression and mental disorders for a while, but it makes sense that we choose the future of the species and higher quality of life over the nature we came from, you know?
Snarl, having sex with Black Dick: You guys are fucking idiots.
