2011

Rise of the Metahumans

[EDIT: The FOXP2 gene seems to be involved in exceptional mammal vocalizations, including Neanderthal vocalizing, not just Sapiens. Something happened in our Sapiens lineage 50,000–100,000 years ago, but was it our FOXP2? Probably not. 4 October 2020]

What if metahumans took over? What if brain mutations appeared in the human population, giving the lucky mutants better ways of communicating, planning, and thinking? What if these mutants created surprising new technologies and used them to overrun everyone else? It would suck, but it wouldn’t necessarily be the end for the rest of us. When regular humans that have children with metahumans, some of the offspring will be meta. Your family line might survive the rise of the metahumans, provided you leave behind metahuman children, grandchildren, or other descendants. It’s harsh for us regular humans who get squeezed out, but maybe the metahumans will develop knew kinds of art, knowledge, and community. They would have all our human intelligence and passion, plus new ways of thinking. They could take humanity in bold new directions. Could such a scenario really happen? For various reasons, the metahumans are unlikely to actually arise any time soon. Fifty to 100 thousand years ago, however, a wave of metahumans did take over. I’m a metahuman, so are you, and so is everyone on the planet. Our mutant ancestors took over when we evolved modern speech and became humans as we know ourselves today.

Before they evolved into metahumans, our ancestors were regular old humans, designated “anatomically modern.” That term distinguishes them from metahumans, who are termed “behaviorally modern.” As anatomically modern humans, our ancestors had stone tools and fire, but nothing more than what the other archaic humans had. Evidently we knew how to sing and dance in groups. Definitely we had all manner of subtle social instincts: for mating, kinship, friendship, rivalry, and more. If we metahumans saw our naked, speechless, anatomically modern ancestors hanging out in a group, we would be able to identify their feelings and motives. They wouldn’t be aliens.

Now that we’ve evolved speech, we have figured out how to sew clothes, weave baskets, carve flutes, trade goods, make rules, promise ourselves in marriage, and tell our survivors how to allot our possessions after death. We speaking humans have plans, intentions, and purposes that other animals couldn’t imagine—not even our anatomically modern ancestors. We have created new and exhilarating lives for ourselves.

Underneath every verbal human mind, however, is an emotional human heart. The word-built mind is deliberate and intentional. The gene-built heart is intuitive and instinctive. We have been living by our hunches and our urges for far longer than we’ve been living by our thoughts and our promises. That’s why our hunches and urges get us to do things that we have trouble justifying with words. More often than not, the ancient, canny emotions get the better of our newfangled thoughts. Our thoughts feel independent, but they mostly they are carrying water for our emotions and intuitions. We metahumans aren’t all that meta after all.

Note: About the time that we were acquiring speech, a mutant version of the Fox-P2 gene appeared and swept through the human population, where it is now universal. Since this mutant gene is involved in speech and grammar, it might well be connected to our acquisition of modern speech.

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The rise of the metahumans as the fall of man.

Evolution as our creator.

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