If the Genes fit…

Are you more ‘Love Island’ or ‘Survivor’?

Throughout human evolution there were multiple species present, living at the same time, sometimes also at the same place. It is as if there were multiple experiments in humankind, of which we are only one. It also amazes me that we are now the only ones left. What does this say about us and our ancestors? Katerina Harvati as quoted in Humans¹ 

We’ve already knocked down one of the pillars of human exceptionalism in an earlier note—specifically, the idea that walking around on two feet made us evolutionary rock stars. Spoiler: it wasn’t all that special, even back then, given that other hominid species were doing the same thing at the same time. We weren't exactly strutting our way to the top of the evolutionary charts.

And then there’s our good ol' technology recency bias—remember that one? The tendency to act like nothing remotely interesting happened until the last few thousand years. As if our ancestors were just sitting around twiddling their opposable thumbs, waiting for someone to invent smartphones and skyscrapers. Not quite. Our ancient relatives were constantly upgrading their toolkits, innovating over hundreds of thousands of years. And, let’s not forget, our hominid cousins were also busy surviving and adapting alongside us until very recently. They were hardly waiting for us to bring the future to their doorstep.

Yet there is so much more to unpack before we even get to the Anthropocene and 'sustainable’ finance!  Most of the evidence for the debunking so far has come from digging up stuff - like fossils and stones. Its generally backbreaking work in some pretty inhospitable conditions. But fast forward to 2013, when the CSI dream team from the Max Planck Institute entered the hominid crime scene. They had finally cracked the late Pleistocene case by mapping a full Neanderthal DNA sequence, minus all the annoying human DNA contamination that had been messing things up for years.

And boom—mic drop! Turns out, some of us of European descent are a bit Neanderthal ourselves. So, yeah, that “you’re such a Neanderthal” insult? Time to retire it. But more to the  point? We were breeding with them. Weird right? And raises some interesting questions, like—did we really find them so repulsive or subhuman? It seems unlikely that Neanderthals didn’t have some kind of shared language or culture. 

You really can’t overstate how wild this is (though, naturally, we downplay it all the time). We, fully modern humans, actually bred with another visibly different hominid species. And not only that, but we stuck around to raise a few mixed-species kids too! For those genes to have survived, it means we weren’t exactly shy about embracing our blended families. Now, think about that for a minute, especially in the context of today’s tendency to distrust anyone we perceive as ‘Others’—whether that’s races, ethnicities, or cultures.

So, was life really as “nasty, brutish, and short” as Thomas Hobbes declared? Short for sure, without all our modern healthcare, but its interesting to consider whether our prehistoric ancestors might have been more tolerant. Struggling with "wokeness"?  I hate to break it to you, but you might not have been particularly suited to this most ancient Love Island season!

Much of our view of progress depends on making linear assumptions about human nature that increasingly seem unsupported.  We could be forgiven if it were just the Neanderthals, but then there’s the Denisovans, another mysterious hominid species. It seems some modern folks of Asian descent carry their DNA and we may have coexisted with them right up until about 25,000 years ago - so perhaps 270,000 years of overlap, That’s plenty of time for mingling…

This evolutionary genetic knowledge has been available for over a decade and is now joined by newer fossil discoveries of species such as H. naledi, which was apparently thriving down in South Africa just as modern humans were emerging in the hominid lineage.   

‘Man’ and His Symbols 

“In 15,000 years, we have invented nothing!”  Pablo Picasso 

Another Jenga block that scientists have recently yanked from the wobbly tower of human exceptionalism relates to our artistic tendencies. Picasso, amazed at what he saw, was referring to the cave paintings at Altamira Cave in Spain, which have since been dated to 36,000 years ago. But our artistic journey began much earlier.

Imagine stumbling upon the Blombos Cave in South Africa, unearthing ochre and beads dating back about 100,000 years. Those finds weren’t just colors and ornaments; they were our ancestors whispering through time, signaling not just abstract thought but some form of symbolic communication or ritual.

As we inch closer to 40,000 years ago, the canvas of human expression becomes richer and more intricate. Picasso wasn’t aware of the grandeur found later in cave paintings in France at Lascaux (1940) and Chauvet (1994). Those detailed renditions of animals and symbols weren’t just pretty drawings; they were a testament to a profound understanding of the world around us. The Chauvet Cave, for example, stands out for its vivid depictions of creatures so lively they might as well have trotted out of the stone. And amazing cave paintings of equal age have also been found in Indonesia. 

Our current ‘exceptionalist’ tale spins that art was humanity’s big “aha!” moment—the birth of complex language, abstract thinking, and, of course, our unrivaled knack for creativity. But wait for it (because, at this point, you’re catching on)—the story just got a whole lot juicier. In 2018, scientists redated artistry in the caves of La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales in Spain. And guess what? These weren’t the doodles of H. sapiens—they were made by Neanderthals 20,000 years before we booked our first European vacation. That’s right, our so-called “less advanced” cousins were busy getting their artsy side on while we were still unfolding the ‘Out of Africa’ map.

So we’ve got to ask, who’s really the teacher here? While we were busy swapping DNA there’s a good chance we were also borrowing some creative and maybe even fashion tips. As we’ve discussed in a prior note, humans were great at stealing ideas. How many more of those cave paintings might be H. sapiens forgeries? Somewhere lies a misunderstood  Neanderthal whispering, ‘Hey Picasso! That was me - I started that whole hand stencil thing!’

Symbols lurk in more than just paintings and carvings; they dance in burial rituals too. From the ornaments accompanying the departed, to tools for a cosmic journey, these practices imply a deeper, unspoken language of symbols. And surprise, surprise! The Rising Star Cave in South Africa, home to that newly found species H.naledi, hints at intentional burials as far back as the middle Pleistocene (circa 300,000 years ago). And get this – they had smaller brains than other Homo species! It’s like symbolism, paint brushes and ochre were handed out like party favors to various hominid species; perhaps we just had more time to practice.

The Long and Winding Road

Cast your mind back to the early and middle Pleistocene, a period less known for its catchy name and more for its role as humanity’s ultimate survival challenge. Then picture this: the Homo erectus population of around 98,000 individuals nosediving by a staggering 98.7%, dwindling to a mere 1280 individuals (below). That’s a couple of plane loads! The culprit was climate change, and the result - a loss of up to 66% of genetic diversity on the planet - provides some context for what a few degrees of temperature change means.  

The lack of fossils led to the initial assumption that there was an evolutionary "bottleneck," but those wily geneticists later confirmed it.

This could have been the moment where H. erectus, that distant Grandma of H. sapiens and the other cast members mentioned here, exited the Survivor set. Yet, in a serious plot twist, we managed to squeeze through the evolutionary keyhole. Now thats true grit - not managing to get your school work done!  Our numbers, once teetering on the brink of the abyss, rebounded to a still modest 27,000 individuals, and we marched along, eventually diverging into the Densovians, Neanderthals, Sapiens and who knows what else?. But hey, from small acorns, mighty oaks grow, right? Our scrappy band of survivors, which likely included the Pointed Cliff crew, didn’t just hang on; they went full intercontinental, eventually populating the entire planet. And the rest is history, or at least the history that we tend to focus on.

So, once again, it seems our evolutionary journey wasn’t a straight shot. Instead of a grand, preordained march toward modernity, it’s looking more like a mashup of Love Island meets Survivor. Nature is the ultimate reality show host, throwing constant curveballs and seeding multiple human ventures. Every so often, these curveballs would lead to population wipeouts—a kind of natural selection elimination round. 

At this point, we can toss aside those overly simplistic notions—the ones that suggest H. sapiens simply wiped out other hominid species or that those species were somehow lacking in higher consciousness, symbolic thinking, or a decent toolkit. The reality? Their genes live on in us offering proof of our knack for seeking broad, adaptive solutions to survive the unpredictable twists and turns of evolution. Compare that with today’s obsession with linear thinking, predictability, and our increasingly narrow ($$$) definition of success.

In future notes, we’ll dig deeper into a couple of key traits that have shaped our relationship with nature: use of fire and its influence on our energy systems, and that less-than-friendly habit of specicide—our tendency to view the earth as a ‘boucherie’. 

Why does all this matter to finance in the Anthropocene? Because sustainability isn’t something you can just enter into a program optimized for 6% growth and a comfy retirement but devoid of biological and physical parameters. It’s unknowable unless we first understand how vulnerable we’ve always been as just one of 8 or 9 million species on this planet—a planet where successful mammalian species measure their time in millions of years, not a couple of centuries with Wi-Fi and air conditioning.  

Only by grasping this vulnerability and using our unique faculty of foresight can we design markets that provide reasonable incentives for improving our relationship with the ecosystem that sustains us. Otherwise, we're just setting up shop in a burning building and wondering why our quarterly earnings report smells like smoke. 

1. Humans, Perspectives on Our Evolution from World Experts, Sergio Almecija. Columbia University Press, 2023.