What makes Homo Sapiens 'Modern Humans'!?

 "There were humans long before there was history." ‘Homo Sapiens’ as we refer to it today is one among millions of species those ever exist on Earth. Then what after all made us dominate the world? What made us stand apart from the rest of the species? Is it only that our DNA or biology-aided evolution that made this happen?

  The answer lies beyond the scope of biology alone.

    Chimpanzees and the genus ‘homo’ has common descents, we had same forefathers. The genus homo had other members too. Homo Neanderthals, Homo Erectus, Homo Rudolfensis where all our brothers and shared our genes. They were not our ancestors as there was a part in the history when these species co-existed with Homo Sapiens. If it was to be a genes that made us different then the entire genus of 'Homo' would have been equally liable. But surprisingly, The entire population that makes us modern humans is Homo Sapiens and the reason can be traced long back before The Internet Revolution, The Industrial Revolution, The Agricultural Revolution to something called “ The Cognitive Revolution”! If one says that we have ‘big brains’ as such, it is important to understand that Homo Neanderthals had bigger than us.

    It was only our ability to “create fiction” that made us 'us'. 

Most of the animals can sense things, remember and communicate them. Like the birds or the chimpanzees can spot a lion and let their companions know that “There is a lion near the lake,”  But only Homo Sapiens could imagine myths and communicate them like when humans spot the same lion, he/she can convey about it to the band as “There is a lion near the Lake, who must have been travelling from so and so path to get to the lake and then the band can put their heads together and generate a plan to hunt it and that’s what makes us ‘us’.

    Furthermore, It is only Homo Sapien who could bring out that ‘The lion is our guardian’ and worship it.

Homo Sapiens is the only species that talk about entire kind of entities that we never see, touch or feel of. Imagine ‘If you could convince a monkey with a banana to give it to you, in promise of  infinite bananas in heaven!’ this can happen only with our species. 

    We can see ants working in a group but that is only in a limited frame with few known members of its own. Also other animals who work and live in herds, packs are arranged in limited compound interest and can corporate with few members of their group, but Homo Sapiens can corporate, co-ordinate in unlimited frame and all owed to the ability to create and communicate myths. 

    All are Institutions, Societies, Nations, Religions, Laws and the entire human civilization is based on, and works on these myths and our common belief in them. 

Imagine for example what is‘Google’ it is not the CEO or the employees, it is neither the users nor it's products in particular, neither the founder Larry Page himself is Google. Years after the founder, the CEO, the employees or the users are no more Google will still be there and Google is ‘Google’ because we commonly believe it to be. Same goes with any other company or institution which has no physical sense but exists only in our collective imaginations and myths.

   Similarly there is nothing as such as laws, constitution or nation unless we commonly believe it to be and it would be completely intact if anyone of us stops believing in it. Thus when I stop believing in Google it would not change anything, to a large scale if we all stop believing in it then we would need some larger organisation like UN (United Nations) to bring it to halt which would again exist only in our collective imagination.

  Thus, as Yuval Harari in his book ‘Homo Sapiens’ states:

“Any large scale human cooperation- whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe- is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination.”

    So we can say it’s not our DNA but our ability to imagine, to create friction, to share common myths that makes Homo Sapiens ‘us’,The modern humans. ‘The cognitive revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology.” Social corporation is our key for survival and existence. Humans can corporate with other humans to establish civilizations and trade, leading us to the modern world and make us modern humans. 

“Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees corporate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can co-operated in extremely flexible ways with countless number of strangers. That's why Sapiens rule the world whereas ants eat our left overs and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.”