Humans have been around for two million years. For 99.5% of that time we lived the same way—within small mobile bands surrounded by friends and family. We made tools, lit fires, foraged food, painted caves, told stories, and raised children. But in the last 400 generations—the blink of an evolutionary eye—we’ve abandoned the timeless certainties of human existence and re-organized our world. We’ve settles down, grown food, created cities, fought battles, worshipped gods, built monuments, written stories, and made more stuff that we could ever imagine. In short, we’ve become civilized. This is the story of that transition.
