Why I'm embracing my inner caveman

In the end we're all just stoned apes, waiting for AI to tell us what to believe in

Meet the Flintstones, a modern stone-age family. Source: Variety.

According to 23andMe, I have more Neanderthal in me than 88 percent of other bipeds. I possess 271 genetic variants associated with Neanderthals, which disappeared from the Earth roughly 40,000 years ago. [1] A little less than 2 percent of my DNA predates Fred, Wilma, Barney, and Betty.

I can see it, frankly.

On any given day, between 60 and 90 percent of my vocalizations are grunts of one form or another. Then there's my protruding brow ridges, my fondness for Mastodon, and the fact my arms drag behind me when I walk.

My 23andMe Neanderthal Report is really quite fascinating. According to my caveman genetic code, I am more likely to have dandruff but less likely to blush easily (except when people point out the dandruff on my suit jacket). I prefer sweet foods to salty and am more likely to sweat during a workout (both true).

It also says I'm less likely to get angry while hungry (hangry) or to be afraid of heights. Both of those things are resolutely untrue. In fact, I'm starting to get a little hangry right now.

I grunt, therefore I'm Dan. Source: Midjourney.

On the other hand, my genetic report tells me I have zero variants associated with hitchhikers thumb, chin dimples, stretch marks, detached earlobes, itchy mosquito bites, poor sense of direction, fear of public speaking, crying while cutting onions, difficulty discarding rarely used possessions, or being unable to sneeze with a full stomach.

Bet you thought I was kidding about all this stuff, didn’t you?

How the 23andMe geniuses come up with this is pretty straightforward. They ask its members a lot of exceedingly personal questions, look at the genetic variants associated with each answer, throw in a little statistical mumbo-jumbo, and aha! That's why I always fart in the middle of Matthew McConaughey's love scenes. It's not me, it's my DNA. [2]

Tell me a story

I think about Neanderthals a lot, and not just when I run into that guy at the gym with no neck and hair bristling out of his tank top.

One of the best books I've read/listened to over the last 10 years is Sapiens by historian Yuval Noah Harari. It offers a plausible explanation as to why we don't continue to see Neanderthals walking around (except for that guy at the gym).

The central question behind Sapiens is that 100,000 years ago there were a half dozen species of humans wandering the planet. [3] Now there's just one (us). How did that happen? Harari's thesis is that Homo sapiens won out over its competition because we were better at telling stories. The ability to believe in stories allowed sapiens (aka, the good guys) to coalesce around a common idea, which enabled us to form larger, more organized groups.

So while the Neanderthals were busy crouching behind boulders and chucking rocks at us, we sneaking around behind them with, I don't know, flamethrowers or something. (The exact mechanics of this are lost to prehistory.) The point is we outsmarted them because we learned how to believe in things that existed only as ideas. [4] The rigidly literal-minded Neanderthals could not. [5]

I like this theory for several reasons, not least of which is that, as a teller of stories myself, it makes me feel more important. Storytelling is the basis for civilization; laws, government, religion, morality, money, and many other things are all fictions we've chosen to believe in, because they help us organize our lives.

Harari calls storytelling the "operating system of human civilization." In a recent essay for The Economist, he warns that allowing machines to tell our stories for us could lead to — yes, that's right — our eventual extinction.

What will happen to the course of history when AI takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? Previous tools like the printing press and radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created new cultural ideas of their own. AI is fundamentally different. AI can create completely new ideas, completely new culture.

At first, AI will probably imitate the human prototypes that it was trained on in its infancy. But with each passing year, AI culture will boldly go where no human has gone before. For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.

In other words, Harari argues, we might soon find ourselves in the same pickle as the Neanderthals did 50,000 years ago, and we'll have AI to thank for it.

I say we need to embrace our inner cave man/woman/other now, so we'll be ready for it when the time comes. I'm already part way there. How about you?

Your cave or mine? Post your thoughts in the comments below and feel free to share this blog with your fellow bipeds.

[1] Obviously they didn't disappear entirely, because their DNA is still kicking around. There are many theories as to what happened; the one I prefer is that homo sapiens were just so much cuter than Neanderthals that they stopped having sex with each other and just started sleeping with us. Kind of a 'cave friends with benefits' arrangement.

[2] This is also how they determine whether you've got genetic markers for things like Alzheimers, breast cancer, or Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. It's not all farts and onions.

[3] There were actually more than 20 species of hominids since we fell out of the trees six million years ago, most recently Homo's sapiens, neanderthalensis, erectus, naledi, and floresiensis, a Hobbit-sized race that lived in Indonesia 100,000 years ago. Ain't science grand?

[4] There is the also the "Stoned Ape" theory that hominids developed more sophisticated forms of communication after eating psilocybin mushrooms and enjoying group sex. “Everyone would get loaded around the campfire and hump in an enormous writhing heap,” wrote Terrence McKenna, creator of the Stoned Ape theory. Those early bipeds had all the fun.

[5] Remind you of anyone you know? A particular political faction, for instance? Just sayin’.