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The Human Origin Story is, probably, wrong

Dr Robin Lincoln Wood
4 min readFeb 10, 2021

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The Human Origin Story is, probably, wrong. Yes, it’s now official.

Archaeologists have been excavating ancient civilizations around the world for many decades and discovered overwhelming evidence that, at root, homo sapiens is, only marginally, a hunter-gatherer. It also turns out that the remaining hunter-gatherer tribes anthropologists have been studying for nearly a century are remnants of much more ancient, sedentary, hierarchical, complex societies, and do not represent the mainstream of how our ancient ancestors lived, and how their minds and cultures formed.

The story we’ve accepted to date about our origins appears to be largely untrue. That story goes something like this:

For 100,000 years, or certainly more, we were hunter-gatherers. And we’ve only been something else in the last 10,000 years. And as late as the time of Christ, 2,000 years ago, half the world was still hunter-gatherers. So, we’re really hunter-gatherers — never mind some of us wear Armani suits — and we don’t know that life.

Except I do, to a small extent, having danced around twin fires with Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert and Okavango basins during my national service as a legal officer in the SA Army in 1980/1. I even got involved in preventing Bushman justice from killing an Ovambo tribesman who had slept with one…

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Dr Robin Lincoln Wood
Dr Robin Lincoln Wood

Written by Dr Robin Lincoln Wood

Co-founder of the Balancer Platform. Rebalancing our unbalanced world with apps & analytics for conscious consumers & organizations. Free at www.balancer.app

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