Nepali Wanderer

Writing a short summary of the entire human history is a fascinating challenge. With plenty of events to cover and theories to dissect, it is also a daunting task. Bearing in mind that I am just an enthusiast and not a historian by any means (not even remotely), I will try my best to narrate with whatever I have been able to learn. So, here we go!

Whenever we talk about human history, it is often easier to discuss it in terms of a few groundbreaking milestones to trace the overall journey. Usually, three revolutions are attributed as the most influential in driving human history:

1. Agricultural Revolution
2. Scientific Revolution
3. Industrial Revolution

The Agricultural Revolution was transformative for early humans. Suddenly, they had surplus food and resources, which meant they didn’t have to wander around like hunter-gatherers anymore. They could settle down, build civilizations, and take a break from their constant quest for survival. (There is of course more to this, with some historians calling Agricultural Revolution the biggest human mistake, etc etc.)

Then came the Scientific Revolution, where humans realized they didn’t have to ascribe everything to the gods anymore. It was like discovering that the magic behind rain, drought, and disease was actually science doing its thing. This led to the birth of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, which paved the way for the Industrial Revolution.
With new ideas, inventions, and innovation, people could create advanced machinery to aid their daily work and control the world in unprecedented ways. Now, fast forward to the present, we find ourselves on the brink of yet another revolution, the Artificial Intelligence Revolution.

But amidst all these revolutions, we still haven’t answered our burning questions: Why did humans rise to the top of the food chain when there were bigger and scarier creatures out there? And why didn’t other human species join in on the revolutions? Enter the Cognitive Revolution, the moment when humans got a brain upgrade. Somewhere between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, our brains’ inner wiring changed, enabling us to create complex languages, considered by many as our greatest invention.

Beyond mere communication, the real highlight of language is our ability to create stories. We invented concepts like countries, laws, money, and religion, all of which feel more real to us than a rock or a tree. These fictions have enabled us to bypass genetic limitations, to think, act, and live differently. Two fictions that have shaped human history the most are Religion and Money.

If you think about it, most of our actions from the moment we wake up — be it our morning prayers or the job we do, conversations we have or the rituals we perform — are shaped, one way or another, by Religion and Money. If our story on Earth were to be turned into a two-hour movie, Religion and Money would be the two central characters. Therefore, in our future stories, we will trace our human story with the aid of these two characters.

It is our first character, Religion, that we will look into first. Next up is the Origin of Religion on Earth.