One of my pet peeves is when people describe cave-dwelling homo sapiens or even late hunter-gatherers with only names like 'grug' and 'ogg'. They're homo sapiens! They have the same brains and mouth and vocal cords that we do.
The earliest name we know from oral history is an Egyptian king named Iry-Hor, the earliest name we have written down is a Sumerian accountant called Kushim. The earliest known author is a Sumerian priestess named Enheduanna. Another name we have from that period is Enmebaragesi. I probably forgot some other beautiful names in this directly-from-wikipedia list.
We can't look further back, but there is nothing to suggest that we were less capable of giving each other beautiful complex names.
Why does this matter? Because the idea that we as a species are constantly becoming superior is bullshit and is tied up closely with a lot of very harmful ideologies (capitalism, eugenics and fascism, to name a few). We're not becoming a superior species. We're passing on information and inventing more stuff and figuring out how to live longer, but those are social processes, they come from humans taking care of each other and valuing the preservation and free exchange of knowledge. They don't come from being fundamentally better than our ancestors, we're not.
jbbartram-illu
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