Homo sapiens

Homo sapiens is an ancient species and possesses the same physical and intellectual "hardware" as we do today. However, the cultural environment shapes its intelligence and we cannot definitively say that our ancestors were more or less intelligent than us; simply put, their world was different. Thus, they thought differently!

This dive into the past of our way of thinking is fascinating. Some references:

• The Bible. The New Testament is the foundation of our civilization. Who were we before? The Old Testament and its archaic stories, transmitted through the millennia, give us a glimpse of it. They reflect the construction of human society, the transmission of wisdom, and the creation of culture.
• The Ancient City, by Fustel de Coulanges: an incredible dive into ancient family and social structures and their evolution as Greek and Roman civilizations rose in power.
• Violence and the Sacred, and then Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, by René Girard: a fascinating proposal on the foundational role of sacrifice and the scapegoat in the construction of human culture, as well as the particular role of the New Testament, which reveals this mechanism.
• The Ancestor, by Juan Jose Saer: a fiction inspired by real events, which plunges into the imagined daily life of a primitive tribe at the time of the conquest of the Americas, with its rituals, language, and integration into the cosmos. The members of this tribe are so different from the hero who finds himself plunged into it for ten years... And yet, are they less human than he is?

Today's Homo sapiens, because of their environment, education, and culture, is very different from pre-Biblical Homo sapiens. It is even already different from Homo sapiens before the industrial revolution. And the hyper-connectivity of our current world is building the new version of Homo sapiens.

Where are the limits of this evolution? Will Homo sapiens disappear with transhumanism? Will it be made obsolete, exterminated, or absorbed by artificial intelligence? Or will it once again succeed in adapting and evolving, without letting technology devour it?