A Brief History of Man
When and why we created God, and how belief transforms our evolution
is about what we now know, and how we know it. Because for the first time in man’s history we can look back and say, scientifically, where we came from, how we got here, and what it is that makes us who and what we are.
Soon after we leave Africa, about 70,000 years ago, our evolution suddenly takes flight. Our population explodes and we quickly begin living as cultural beings in an increasingly organized, proto-society.
We begin to trade, to use personal ornamentation, to ritually bury our dead, to paint caves in an incredibly organized way, and to produce the thousands of “Venus” figurines that we have now unearthed. And it is at this point that we begin to speak.
Yet all this happens in the depths of the Ice Age, and at a time when our closest neighbour and nearest rival, the Neanderthal, suddenly perishes. Why? What are all of these developments for? And why do we suddenly become so much better at surviving because of them?
Because what we begin to do once we leave Africa is to practice belief. Belief is what makes us who and what we are, and is what nearly all of those practices are used for. But what we believe in is immaterial.
God does not surface until much later, because belief and God serve two very different ends and have very different histories. The latter only emerges with our need for a legal code, and that only happens after the ending of the Ice Age and the arrival of agriculture and the first villages.
Belief, on the other hand, is our ultimate response to our understanding of what it means to be human. For we are first and foremost problem solvers. And belief is our way of solving all of our problems.
View the promo for it here.
See the Table of Contents, and read the Prologue here.