Humanity’s Social Evolution

Roughly one-hundred-fifty-thousand years ago
Society resided in small family-linked groups
Huddled around little fires in caves
And is secluded spaces
Hunter-gathers with some small tools
And minor artifacts defined us

Then came the Agricultural revolution
Combined with animal husbandry
Also the age of copper tools and weapons
Allowed societies to establish
More permanent camps and towns
And eventually cities

The bronze and iron ages quickly followed
City-states, religions, and philosophies
Began to define social status and ‘birthrights’
Artisans and crafts became the backbone
That societies coalesced around
Hunter-gatherers losing status

Language and mathematics brought
New levels of technical sophistication
Larger social groups started conquering
Lesser ones to dominate larger
Swaths of land and resources
Maintaining the claim, not enough to go around

For awhile, religion reined supreme
Social norms require the blessing of
Clerics and the priesthood class
Which sanctioned kings, by divine right
The collusion of ‘nobility’ and religion
Dividing the world up as they saw fit

Toward the end of that era
The printing press began ‘mass media’
And the Industrial Revolution initiated
The end of Agrarian society’s
Wars for ‘scarce’ resources went global
As science put religion into perspective

The Atomic Age gave humanity the
Ability to end human life on Earth
Along with an alternative to fossil fuels
Then came geothermal, solar, and wind
More alternatives for the energy-gluttons
That are human ‘national’ and ‘global’ economies

But there is a new era beginning
That will change human society as no other has
AI (artificial intelligence or alien intelligence)
A matter of perspective for pedantics
Intelligence other than human will change
Human society’s more drastically than all

The previous evolutions, combined

And no one is ready for it

–LE 2/2/26

PS: Our political and social leaders should be preparing us for what’s to come, but so far, they are more interested in partisan bickering than preparing humanity for existential change about to overwhelm us all.