We don’t know much. So if you want to go on believing that the planet is six thousand years old and the handiwork of a remote divine creator, I guess that’s cool.
For whatever reason, I prefer this version.
Round numbers, Life as we know it started four billion years ago, and for 90% of that time, we the living were all just variations on ocean-based pond scum.
According to this version, during the latest ten percent of its journey, Life began crawling up out of the water and onto the land. Fish became frogs and then lizards and then dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs grew wings and became birds.
Meanwhile some random tiny mouse things grew fur instead of feathers, and began to feed their spawn milk instead of the more traditional egg yolk.
After 99.95 percent of the Life time had passed, in the last 0.05%, roughly 1.5 to 2 million years ago, something vaguely resembling you and me, bipedal critters capable of using tools and fire, showed up.
The Humans That ‘Built Houses’ 1,750,000 Years Before Us
200,000 years before present is the date for functionally modern homo sapiens. The percents are getting so small as to be meaningless, but they are: 99.995/.005, of the span of this thing called Life.
Every one of us would still all be hunter-gatherers and natural-born anarchists for the first 19/20ths of that tiny fraction, until the earliest manifestations of the whole agriculture/sedentism thing even began, ten thousand years ago, give or take.
This whole bloody headfucked notion of what it means to be civilized–whether you want to base your definitions on that Literally True Bible or on Holy Science Itself–has happened among one weird little subspecies, in a fraction of a blink of an eyelash, on a blue rock flying around one random star among trillions upon trillions of other stars.
It has evolved … in our heads. Within this thing we hesitantly refer to as Our consciousness.
Every single bit of it is optional.
And for the most part I am choosing …
to opt out of it
and to get as far out of the way of it as (humanly) possible.