It's 200,000 BCE. You're an early Homo sapiens living with your band in a tropical forest. You spot your brother next to a cluster of boulders, humming to himself in his throat, swaying aimlessly back and forth.
This isn't unusual—whenever your band stops near a rockfall or boulder, he sits next to the rocks for hours, sometimes staring at bumps and ridges in the stone, sometimes banging rocks together—Clack-clack-clack. He has never shown any interest in foraging or hunting. If you hand him a rock to crush a nut or throw at a predator, he will stare fixedly at the texture of the stone until someone snaps him out of it.
When you reach him you notice something unusual—he has sorted the rocks. In one group of piles, there are paler, more irregular chunks of stone. In some other, smaller piles, there are smoother, darker bits of stone, fractured in clean, curving pieces. You pull him back to the rest of the group so he can eat and rest—he has been banging the rocks together all day, and he typically forgets everything else when he finds particularly interesting rocks. You pick up one of the darker pieces. Its edge is sharp, sharp enough to cut. You skim it along a thin green sapling and watch the bark peel off like fat.
You have used sharp rocks as tools in the past, even found rocks with such sharp edges; you wonder if there's a way to find more. The next time your band moves its camp, you search the area for other rocks that look like the one you picked up, but find nothing.
You decide to follow your brother down a stony riverbank to the shore, watching him bang different rocks together and arrange them into rows and piles on the sand, humming happily. Some rocks seem to make him very excited and happy; he sets them aside in their own piles. Others are less significant, though he still deliberates about what piles to put them in.
You show him the shard you picked up earlier. He stares at it for a while and then, silently, searches the riverbed until he finds a dark chunk of stone. He presses it into your hand.
You point at a similar-looking rock. He looks angry and frustratedly kicks the water, then hands you another piece of dark stone, as if you should know better. This repeats for some time. But by the end of the evening, you are starting to notice that every rock is different, that many are beautiful, and that some are useful.
At another place, in another time, someone else is fascinated by snakes. She always closely examines snakes others in her band have killed, and can be seen observing them when they are alive.
Her family members notice that she can immediately distinguish a snake that is venomous from a similar snake that is safe, and she always, always sees snakes before anyone else does. Once, when they were about to make camp, she became upset and was inconsolable for hours, and no one realized why until one of the elders was nearly bitten by a deadly snake hiding in some fallen leaves. The group decides that she must have known there were snakes nearby, even without seeing one, and from then on, she surveys all potential campsites before anyone settles down.
Another person whose name we will never know loves the sounds of birds. All day long he echoes the birds' songs as they walk through the forest, imitating the noises of whatever bird he heard last. Even a glimpse of a bird will set him imitating the bird's song. Hunters in his group notice after a while that even the birds seem to be fooled by him, and practice bird calls until they are skilled enough to lure their quarry close.
Much later, someone feels more at home with the flighty goats her clan herds for meat than with other people. The goats flee from others, but they become so habituated to her that they respond to her calls, and regard her as one of their own. They let her treat their injuries and sicknesses, allowing members of the herd to recover from what would otherwise have killed them.
Yet another person somewhere else picks the wool of wild sheep off rocks and tree branches where it has been shed, rolling it in her hands until it sticks together. She loves the touch of the soft wool so much that she notices that enough wool, if it is worked enough, can be felted together into single pieces like hides, or twisted together into strong threads. She tracks the fluffiest sheep to their favorite scratching spots and soon the hunters won't pursue the tracks that belong to her favorites, instead leaving them to produce fluffy lambs.
Our species is shaped by the contributions of people who paid a little more attention to the world than usual.
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