not just right
Cindness KULT
*✧The answer is always kindness. (not a cult btw)✧*
A Human Story
An infographic charting our species' journey from deep evolutionary past to the complexities of the modern world.
I. The Deep Past: Becoming Human
The Hominid Split
Millions of years ago, our ancestors stood up. Bipedalism freed our hands, setting the stage for tool use but creating a critical evolutionary challenge for childbirth.
3x Brain Expansion
Our brains tripled in size, a process called encephalization. This massive growth fueled advances in toolmaking, strategy, and social life.
Expensive Tissue
To fuel our energy-hungry brains, our digestive tracts shrank. This was made possible by cooking and eating more energy-dense foods, a change that also encouraged social cooperation.
The Obstetric Dilemma: An Evolutionary Trade-Off
Efficient Bipedalism
(For walking)
Narrower Pelvis
Large Brain
(For intelligence)
Larger Skull
Result: Social Birth
Human birth became uniquely challenging, making us dependent on our social groups for survival from the very beginning.
II. The Original Human Society (~300,000 - 10,000 BCE)
For over 95% of our history, *Homo sapiens* lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Our greatest strength was not technology, but our connection to each other in small, intensely social groups.
Humanity's Superpower: The Social Group
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar found a link between brain size and group size. Humans evolved to manage communities far larger than our primate relatives, a capacity maintained through ritual, language, and gossip.
The "Original Affluent Society"
Hunter-gatherer life was an affluence of time, not things. With needs met in 15-20 hours a week, the vast majority of life was spent on social bonding, storytelling, and ritual.
Worldview: The Age of Animism
The predominant worldview was animism: the belief that everything in nature—animals, plants, rivers, rocks—possesses a spirit and agency. This required a symbolic culture, famously expressed in the ritualistic cave paintings at sites like Chauvet, France, to communicate with a world that was alive and meaningful.
III. The Agricultural Revolution (~10,000 BCE)
The shift to farming was a profound rupture in human history. It led to a population boom but fundamentally altered our societies, our work, and our relationship with the world.
How Farming Changed Everything
Sedentism & Surplus
Farming tied people to land. For the first time, societies could generate a food surplus.
Private Property & Patriarchy
Surplus led to concepts of ownership and inheritance. Controlling land became paramount, driving a shift toward rigid patriarchal structures to manage lineage.
War, Money & Theism
Concentrated wealth created an incentive for organized warfare. Systems of accounting were born to manage grain, a precursor to money. Moralizing "Big Gods" emerged to enforce cooperation in now-anonymous, large-scale societies.
IV. The Industrial & Modern Era (~1760 CE - Present)
The last few centuries have been a period of unprecedented acceleration, generating immense wealth and technology but also profound disconnection and anxiety.
The Redefinition of Work
The factory replaced the field, and life became regimented by the clock. The average work week exploded, a stark contrast to our ancestors' "affluent" leisure time. The 40-hour week was a hard-won victory of labor movements.
The Empathy Deficit
"We have journeyed from small, high-trust communities where empathy was a survival necessity to massive, anonymous societies where it can be a liability. Modern structures often reward self-interested behavior, creating an 'empathy deficit.' The pathologizing of neurodivergent traits—which often reflect older, more connected ways of perceiving the world—is a symptom of this deficit."
In a system that devalues connection, empathy is an act of rebellion.