Mathematically we can say we are all descended from a single parent. We now have around 7 billion human population, going back 100 years, we had 1/4th of this count. Continuing to go back in years, should give us just a few people as our original ancestors.
For some reason, our ancestors migrated from East Africa to other continents, it could be for food or internal conflict or due to increased danger or climatic conditions.
As we had discussed earlier, nature has made constraints within which we can act. Remember the laws of thermodynamics, energy can only be converted from one form to another. We must take food to be active. For food, we must depend on plants and animals. Plants and animal have their dependencies. Plants need water and light, animals need plants and other animals to feed.
So, primarily humans are dependent on animals and hunted them for food. This was the only primary action for millions of years, living in forests. This could be the reason we derive peace when living in a natural environment, say in a forest. We later used fire to cook food, around 1.5 million years ago. Then these hunter-gatherers started agriculture. This is mostly due to climate change where long dry seasons leave more dormant seeds., where long dry season, leaving dormant seeds. An abundance of readily storable wild grains and pulses enabled hunter-gatherers in some areas to form the first settled villages by 11000 BC.
Without having to go deeper into agricultural practices, this process helped easily harvest food without having to go into forests. This way, humans settled in some places permanently giving rise to societies. A society is a group of individuals living together with common sets of norms. It has a common culture and territory.
Society forms behaviors of individuals by telling what is acceptable and what is not. This is to ensure smooth living and expectable social behaviors.
Within a society, we show favoritism based on the gene pool we belong to. The closer the blood relation, the higher the genetic match. We will care more for our family members, followed by relatives, and then our community. There is a natural affinity towards our own gene pool. There is a high degree of cooperation in this and is necessary for social living.
Our cognitive abilities help us identify good and bad, signaling our individuality like this is my son, my house. This behavior is necessary with larger groups of people living together. Essentially most things are group co-ordination, like groups of genes working together forming a human, groups of members in a family coordinating together, families in a society, states in a country.
Language
To survive and grow, every animal needs some form of communication among the group it belongs to. Humans should have used some form of proto language 2 million years ago, considering they had stone flakes 4 by then. But the form of language we use now could not have existed then. Agriculture and cooked food helped our chins to go softer, in turn allowing us to produce better sounds through our mouth.
Take a chimpanzee, their mouths are hard built to chew raw food while cooked food does not require such efforts to eat. Enough food gave us time to focus on other things giving rise to literature, arts. Early humans, before language, only used concepts to think. Say, he needs to go hunting .
Early language was primarily used to warn other humans of possible danger, with better language skills, our survival rate had increased. But how? Every animal is dependent on other animals, for a lion we are the prey. With survival instinct kicking in, every animal does its best possible to protect itself.
Now just individual skills are not enough to beat them in the competition, we need more hands to beat them. Humans with better communication skills had better chances of killing animals for food.
Going a little deeper, language is just a form of input to our brain. The brain sees patterns, as long as there is a consistency in the input and action, it would understand. Say, to your dog, feed a particular food on a specific time everyday, by calling out the same name. The dog would associate that word to food, whenever you mention that word later, it would go crazy.
Coming to how language influenced human behavior, we know a better way to express our needs to others. Chances of getting a favor from others has increased. The nature of language varies according to the needs of the society. Let’s go back to society, it has created,
Social status
Social status is a hierarchy, different type of people taking up different positions based on their significance to the society they belong. A lot of activities we do try to leave a signal to the society, like buying a costly car or house. This helps establishing the status which helps in our survival . This book I am writing is also some sort of signalling to the people around me I am smart enough to observe things and write a book. This helps me establish a status quo in my society.
To explain it better, I will take the example of crocodile since we have a complex social structure. Crocodiles have hierarchy based on their physical size and strength.
The leader gets to eat the hunt first followed by the next crocodile in the layer. This top priority gives the leader better chances of survival while the last one in the hierarchy has the risk of dying out of starvation.
Religion
Religion came into existence because of individuals with strong values except religions like Hinduism which does not have a single person as the creator. Buddha believed life is suffering, and we should attain insight into deep nature of life. Nirvana seems to be the final goal. Religions provide a common template for what is good and bad.
Early form of religions were headed by the king who would act as the spiritual leader. He had the authority to collect taxes from his people. Religions emerged as a means of maintaining peace between unrelated individuals. People of same religions have similar culture and values.
Need for acceptance
Having settled as a society, people depended on each other for the day to day living. If you don’t follow the norms, you are in the risk of being kicked out which might affect the survival and reproduction. Remember those two are our primary instincts.
Going to church, temple or any valued place in your culture gives the opportunity to be part of the society which increases our sense of belonging and security. Consider you do something that is not acceptable in your society. What will happen? You will lose your reputation which would lower your social status. A lot of attention-seeking activities are actually born out of the need for acceptance.
This can be correlated to the body’s pain-producing system, whenever we feel pain it’s body’s signal to our brain indicating something is wrong with a part of the body.