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Introduction to The Human Journey
The parent Institute of this project, The Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, was founded on providing the basis of information available to the general public, primarily about what it means to be human: our capacities, our weaknesses, our potential. This project is under the direction of Robert Ornstein with contributions from associates of ISHK: Click to see the list of names.
We inaugurate this website – the story of our journey – with a long view of the deep background of our species, the forces that made us, some significant steps along the way, and a view to the future.
Of course one website, especially one helmed by a small group of people in a small institute, can’t be comprehensive. We’re concentrating on a few areas where information isn’t represented well. And there is so much work published, streamed along the internet, that we’ve also recommended many of the most useful works in print, on the web and on disk.
Where to begin is always a question. Where, do we say, humanity began? And what made those early ancestors “human”? We’re not going to be overly precise in this since there isn’t much evidence, and it’s scattered throughout the world. We first present a brief overview of the ancestors of modern human beings with a set of illustrations and timelines so one can keep the complex history better in mind. We have reviewed selected works of particular relevance to our evolutionary journey. Throughout this website we have links to other websites, and book recommendations for those wishing to go further.
So its beginnings are not at the origin of the universe, or the billions of years of the development of life from the primordial slush (everyone says “primordial soup,” but that’s too appetizing). And, of course, there has been an explosion of interest in early human beings, with the development of genetic testing, carbon-dating and countless archaeological field workers. We are going to choose a few points of interest that are of the most importance to our past and future. Where there is superior work by a large organization, we’ll point you to it, and for all important work, we’ll provide a summary and illustrations as well as, of course, links.
About 100,000 years ago modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) appeared in East Africa and the Middle East. Research in fields such as genetics, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and linguistics will help us follow the major routes taken by modern humans in their expansion from these areas to the present day.
This Human Journey website will overlay the significant stages of this journey with what we know of how we adapted physically and culturally to conditions along the way. Our hope for anyone using the website is that an examination of these determinants will reveal a better understanding of who we are and why we do what we do.
We’ve divided it thus:
The Human Legacy
To provide an understanding of the basic, shared complement of abilities all humans possess: Our Distant Ancestors, Human Universals and Language Development. An overview of the ways our ancestors settled the earth: Out of Africa and Early Settlements
The Road to Now
An overview of what is known of this pivotal era of human history when the great modern religions took root: Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and the flowering of Judaism, and of the Greek Revolution: The Axial Age (Currently In Development)
The Next World: World 2.0 (Currently In Development): The key questions humanity faces in our near future and how we can help.
We have a world of 6+ billion people many of whom have possibilities beyond any previous culture’s wildest dreams but half of whom are very poor.
This section will consider the controversy over how best to foster development in poor countries—the developed world has spent almost 3 trillion dollars on aid with less results than had been hoped. How can aid and development be improved?
Two poles of the discussion are: that it hasn’t been done efficiently or that it has been misdirected through “top down” large projects.
We’ll consider new approaches, social entrepreneurship, a focus on the power of the “Bottom Billion,” micro-credit, the stimulation of new business, globalization, its pluses and minuses.
Moving beyond our inheritance; who we are and what we might become
The human story is one of movement and adaptation to our own movement—individually and collectively, psychologically and physically. The underlying process has been the evolution of perception under different circumstances. We now know that the different “worlds” we inhabit—family, language, culture—actually complete the development of the brain. The brain, developing in the world, wires up differently, and this is why individuals in different cultures have such difficulty understanding each other: even their visual systems are not the same.
As our contact with other cultures increases, it’s vital to understand differences in human development to appreciate better what we share and can learn from each other. Our need is to evolve more accurate views of our world and ourselves from which we can develop a more complete understanding of who and what we are, and what we might become. We human beings inherit much, and the most important thing we inherit is the ability to go beyond our inheritance.
Follow those who left
Starting from our beginnings in Africa and the Middle East, visitors to The Human Journey website will follow those who left, consider what factors mitigated their leaving, and see where they went.
Stages of the human journey:
- The journey started from Eastern Africa and the Middle East. Where did it take us? How did we change along the way? How did our journey affect us all so differently and in so many ways: skin color, languages, cultures, customs, and beliefs?
- Humanity’s movement began with small groups splintering off and beginning their individual evolution, developing perceptions of the world in response to different circumstances.
- Eventually peoples crossed paths, influenced each other, and began to come back together.
As they navigate through these stages on the website, visitors will see what adaptations/choices were required/selected in various circumstances, how these and adaptations to various environments lead to specific changes in culture, diet, world view, perception, social organization, language, math, and forms of communication. As human beings, we don't only adapt, we make choices. Our goal is to help contributors and readers come to a better understanding of the process: What are the real goals, stated or unstated? What, in the perception of the community or its leaders, are the reasons why something needs to happen? What were the perceived problems and their possible solutions?
Confronting these decisions will be one of the interactive features of the website. Visitors will even be able to suggest alternatives.
Visitors will be able to see which solutions were selected in different communities and why. How did these solutions affect the community and change people's perceptions of themselves and their world? Visitors will see how the accumulation of such creative adaptations makes our cultures and us so different. Visitors will also be able to explore how we are all the same. What are the “Human Universals,” the things we all have in common with which we began the journey and which continue to unite us as human beings?
and The New York Stock Exchange.
Key questions about mankind
Along the way, visitors will confront some of the most basic questions about mankind. Who are we, really? How did our myths about ourselves develop? Which myths are useful and which stand in our way? What tendencies in us made us select and cling to the stories we chose to represent our histories? Are there patterns running through these histories we can recognize because of our exposure to psychology, both traditional and contemporary?
What is the basic “package”?
What do we all share—e.g., nervous system, language ability?
What was the first social grouping?
As groups became larger and began to move, what structures and institutions developed to handle the changes and keep society organized? How and when do the institutions begin to serve themselves instead of the people and begin to lose their adaptive value? What is the role of the small group in fostering new adaptive change?
What patterns, similarities and differences do we see in the development of our various cultures, myths and stories, religion, language, diet, emotions, art and architecture, music?
and a map of the internet
Problem-solving and specialization
Human beings were always problem solvers, both psychically and physically. But once out of the immediate danger of large predators, how good were we at selecting the real problems that needed solving? Or did we focus on the problems that attracted us: the emotionally satisfying ones, or the easy ones? And how good are we now? How accurate is our view of our thought as “rational,” our emotions as “true” our speech as “honest,” our God or not-god as “right”? How did dealing with expanded territory and community contribute to specialization? Did specialization contribute to an emphasis of some views and skills over others?
Once we begin to answer these questions, like a master chess player, we can better predict outcomes and make moves to ensure a better future. Our own work is, as said, a fragment of what’s available so ISHK will be offering links to a hundred or so recommended works on Human Nature covering the range from prehistory to how we choose the future. This will include, for the first time, available websites, videos, and DVDs.
Among the works are those of Edward T. Hall, Marvin Harris, Jeffrey Sachs, Roger Sperry, Paul Ehrlich, Bart Ehrmann, Elaine Pagels, Marvin Meyer and many others. Links to DVDs will include America’s Stone-Age Explorers as well as evolution and Religion in the Axial Age (published by The Teaching Company) to answer the many, many people who write and ask “How do I find out more, what should I read,” etc. Some are to be found now on www.ishk.net/books/recommended_reading.html. Of course, this is an ongoing project since new discoveries and new works appear regularly.