The Inner Monologue

We moderns live under a comforting delusion — that we are the culmination of a grand story called progress. We look back on the people of 1,000 or 10,000 years ago as primitive: simple-minded, superstitious, and emotionally undeveloped. We talk about “ancient man” as though he were another species, fumbling toward the light of civilization that we, in our cleverness, finally kindled.

It’s a flattering story. But it’s wrong.

The truth is far less convenient and far more profound: the humans of 10,000 years ago were us. Not “like” us. Us.

They were born with the same brain mass, the same emotional range, the same capacity for cruelty, compassion, humor, and art. If a Paleolithic infant were born in a modern hospital today and raised in a suburban home, they would grow up indistinguishable from any modern child — fluent in language, capable of algebra, fascinated by screens. And if you or I were transported back to 8000 BCE, stripped of our gadgets and conveniences, we would not become geniuses among fools. We would become frightened, cold, and likely dead within the week.

The Archaeologist’s Illusion

Our misunderstanding comes from the lens through which we view the past. Archaeology, as noble as it is, is a profession built on fragments. A handful of bones, shards of pottery, a carving of an animal — and from that, entire civilizations are imagined into being.

A ring of stones becomes a temple. A painting becomes a religious rite. A buried skull becomes a chieftain. And because we have no way of asking the people who left them, we invent meaning. We always do this — because we must.

The irony is that we project our values backward. We assume that organized labor requires religion, that complexity requires hierarchy, that decoration implies ceremony. When we find jewelry, we imagine vanity. When we find weapons, we imagine war. We never imagine the mundane — that someone simply liked how something looked, or made something for fun, or had no cosmic reason at all.

And someday, millennia from now, the same will be done to us.

Archaeologists of the future will uncover layers of twisted metal and fossilized plastic, fragments of microchips, and inexplicable icons. They will find statues of celebrities and call them gods. They will find football stadiums and call them arenas of ritual combat. They will find rows of gravestones and misinterpret them as voting precincts. They will study our vast digital archives and conclude that early humans communicated entirely through propaganda, pornography, and recipes.

And they will be just as wrong about us as we are about those who came before.

Emotion and Intellect Are Timeless

Strip away the smartphone, the skyscraper, the space telescope, and you are left with the same human animal who painted on cave walls by firelight.

The same one who wept over the loss of a child.
The same one who laughed when someone slipped on wet ground.
The same one who looked at the stars and wondered, why am I here?

Intellectually, there is no meaningful difference. What separates us is not mental capacity but cultural memory — the cumulative inheritance of trial and error, passed down through language, writing, and technology. We stand atop a mountain of shared knowledge, but the climbers beneath were just as capable. They simply had not yet built the mountain.

Imagine the first person who chipped flint into a blade. They were as innovative as the person who first split the atom. The difference is scale, not spirit.

Emotionally, too, we are identical. The ache of unrequited love, the terror of mortality, the thrill of discovery — these are not modern emotions. These are human constants. The earliest myths are full of the same passions we see in today’s dramas: envy, betrayal, ambition, lust, devotion. If we read the Epic of Gilgamesh or the letters of Roman soldiers to their families, what shocks us most is not how alien they are, but how familiar. Their anxieties are our own. Their humor could have been written yesterday.

The Futility of Feeling Superior

Our sense of superiority to the ancients is not based on evidence, but insecurity. It comforts us to think we are smarter, that history moves in a single, upward direction — from barbarism to enlightenment. But that is not how evolution works, nor how history unfolds.

Progress is not a staircase. It is a tide — it advances, it retreats, and it erases as much as it builds. The fall of Rome, the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the collapse of the Mayan cities — these were not the failures of inferior minds, but the fragility of complex societies. Ours is just as fragile, and likely just as temporary.

Ten thousand years from now, archaeologists may excavate our world and marvel at how such an advanced species could drown in its own plastic and choke on its own data. They will wonder why a people capable of flight and computation could not manage clean water or empathy. They may conclude we were “transitional” — half-awake creatures, clever enough to build a world but too childish to sustain it.

And they will pity us.

The Continuum of Being

The uncomfortable truth is that there has never been a primitive human. There have only been humans — endlessly inventive, endlessly afraid, endlessly curious.

Our ancestors had gods because they didn’t yet have Google. We have Google because we no longer have gods we trust. That is not progress. It is variation.

When we look back at the past, we should do so with humility, not arrogance. The farmers who built the first cities, the artists who painted the Lascaux caves, the thinkers who counted the stars — they were not the prelude to us. They are us, written in a different syntax.

And when future generations dig through our ruins and wonder what we thought, what we loved, what we feared — they will find themselves in the answers.

Because they too will be human.

And they too will be wrong about us.