Our brains have not evolved for the environment in which we live. Jaguars have, historically, eaten humans more often than they’ve driven them around at outrageous speeds. The internet has existed for the merest nanosecond of evolutionary history.
An interesting article in the New York Times more accurately describes the evolutionary pressures that resulted in our modern brains when it describes a recent find of 78 flint tools dating back more than 800,000 years ago. The ecosystem in which early humans lived in Great Britain was described as:
The world at the time confronted serious climate change in the form of global cooling. It was the middle of the Pleistocene, the last great ice age that ended 10,000 years ago.
The dense Northern European forests of the Pleistocene ice age contained few animals or edible plants, but food would have been more abundant in the flood plain where the flint tools were found. Mammoth, red deer and elk grazed the grasslands, preyed upon by two species of saber-toothed tigers, the dirk-toothed cat and the scimitar-toothed cat.
The early humans living at this time found themselves filling the role of lower scavenger in this ecosystem. Right behind the giant hyenas that feed off the kills of saber‑toothed tigers.
The world our ancestors grew up in was brutal. Their lives were often short because of it. Our brains capacity to understand the world evolved because of the pressures this created until such a point that we’ve been able to kill off the saber‑toothed tiger and the giant hyenas. Their legacy resides in how they’ve influenced our brains.
