August 22 - Sourdoire Valley Song

One of the hardest things in the world to fully accept, and one that's simultaneously deeply reassuring and deeply disturbing: we were always like this. And that's for a very broad definition of "we" and an only moderately broad definition of "this".

We like to think of people too far in the past as basically alien. This is especially true if you've read literature from long enough ago that the story forms didn't quite work, where our shared cultural assumptions aren't shared. But it's still true that the people writing GIlgamesh and so forth loved their children, mourned their dead, hoped for better things, came up with explanations for shapes in the dark and in the stars.

So why wouldn't that be true of other reasoning creatures on our planet?

We know that Neanderthals mourned their dead. We know they had rituals. We know that they knew ceremony and interpersonal bonds. We know that they interbred with homo sapiens. We know, in short, that a small part of them is a small part of us. Some of our thoughts were theirs. Some of our explanations for what is in the dark and in the stars has the same shape as theirs.

Nothing is new, and that's a reassurance as much as it is a lament.