The dinner table and human history: a book insight.
Book: sapiens
Book insight: Humans will do anything for dinner- e.g. wipe an entire species and also develop language abilities.
I’m coming to see and appreciate everything about the dinner table- the wisdom, the storytelling down to the sugar consumption.
Tens of thousands of years ago when the first of our humankind magically descended from some ape great-grandmother, we were a mere blip on the face of the earth. (Now, because our scientist brothers and sisters love naming everything, they grouped us together and called us sapiens which means “wise human”).
At the time, to point and call as closest relatives, we only had the neanderthals, who descended from the sister of our ape great-grandmother, but much like our chimpanzee cousins, wouldn’t give a second’s thought to ripping us to shreds when they food was at risk.
What a joyful family dynamic, hey?
The neanderthals would win the battle for dinner almost every single time. This would make sense because they had the better brawn- the muscles, the better tools and millions of years of lived experience cumulatively. And for years we fought.
However, once we acknowledged that we had good-for-nothing backs and atrophied arms in comparison to neanderthals, victory seemed like it was closer. We developed a striking ability to conjure up the most fascinating ideas, and build in the most intricate of details into our communication through moulding of sound.
Thus, was born- Language.
We, the sapiens, could say speak volumes about one thing, while they, the neanderthals, could at most make a few grunts that meant “monkey”. .
and so gradually, we learnt to-
a) use this same ability to strategise and steal dinner from our cousins,
b) to completely destroy the neanderthals (barring some attractive, submissive ones which we inducted into the family),
c) do the same with all other species, and
d) then establish our presence on earth as the “eat everything class”.
e) Oh, we also learnt to gossip.
Good things came out of this too.
f) From this very ability to mould language came our ability to imagine and storytell, from that came wisdom.
That’s why today you and I can sit at a dining table with colleagues and talk endlessly about the future of education, serious concerns that the offspring of the coming generations will be wired differently (as smart-phone dependent idiots) and that driving on the road today is more scarier than sky-diving.
Oh, and our sugar and high-calorie consumption- that too is part of our “dinner table history”. Our more ape-like grandmothers used to strip bare sweet plum trees because they were a rarity and food well as we have established that was scarce.
See, life starts and ends with dinner.
So, while I recognise my inner prehistoric grandmother this morning, I shall go back to binge-eating bread. Because that is part of our human brand.