Do you ever think how we got here as humans? Do you realize that within the history of things, we just arrived, that we humans are brand new to the universe? Every month we discover a tidbit more about our past and we skewer it on a metal needle and dip it into a pot of hot cheese fondue and eat it as if it is the most natural revelation. (Hey, I haven’t had cheese fondue since Scottie Mosher’s Christmas party, c. 1982.)

If we start with the age of the Universe as 13.8 billion years old, and our own solar system as 4.6 billion years old, and we accept that the first one-half billion years of Earth was lifeless and hot and boiling, then we are down to 4 billion years of known life in the entire universe. Life may have started and been extinguished numerous times in the early days of our planet. LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, the hypothetical originating organism of all life forms, bacteria, plants, animals – everything outside of viruses – emerged about 4 billion years ago and for most of those 4 billion years humanity was just a glimmer in Mother Nature’s eyes.

The oldest physical evidence directly attributable to our species are fossilized footprints laid down in sand on the west side of South Africa 153,000 years ago. That seems like a long time, but, hey, it’s nothing on the historical scale of existence. The oldest known hominoid footprints are 3.66 million years old and were laid down by Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus in east Africa. Homo heidelbergensis developed regional differences and over time separated into Homo neanderthalensis in Europe and us, Homo sapiens, who had stayed behind in Africa and later emigrated out of Africa into the northern Neanderthal territories.

If we are looking for modern man, what do we find?

The oldest known sculpture is a wooden carving of a man with the head of a lion standing erect with his arms to his sides. The Lion Man sculpture is 40,000 years old and was found in the German Alps. The oldest known cave painting was done by a Neanderthal 64,000 years ago using red ochre on a cave wall in Spain. The artist used his hand as a stencil. In Indonesia there are three red pigs on a cave wall 45,000 years old. Cave paintings from Borneo to Siberia to France reveal human art 20,000 to 40,000 years old. You like jewelry? A set of 33 snail shells, drilled for a necklace, were found in a cave on the edge of the desert in western Morrocco and are believed to be 150,000 years old.

The oldest known life-sized sculpture is known as the Urfa Man and was found in modern day Turkey not far from what many scholars consider the first known temple, a structure built solely for worship, Gobekli Tepe, an amazing site I would love to visit, you know, if I live long enough. Gobekli Tepe is around 11,000 years old. It is a mysterious stone complex built with immense communal effort. It covers over 20 acres, of which less than 2 acres have been excavated. Urfa Man and Gobekli Tepe predate the age of pottery as utensil. While some decorative pottery dating to 23,000 years ago has been found in China, and there are some Czech pots dating to 28,000 years, pottery as a useful, everyday tool did not emerge until 7,000 years ago, ruffly corresponding to the development of agriculture.

Let’s think about this early temple for a minute. Back in my heavy drinking days, when any saloon would do, a favorite topic was “did ethics and morality begin with religion, or was religion a usurpation of the ethics already inherent within mankind?” The Golden Rule is found across most cultures and, it not being specific to any one religion or race, indicates to me that there is a universal understanding of morality outside of anyone’s religious belief. And, as Christopher Hitchens liked to point out, it is hard to believe that before Moses came down from the Mount with the tablets of the Ten Commandments, humans thought it was simply fine to rape, murder and sleep with your neighbor’s wife. Religion gets its morality and ethics from humans, not the other way around: humans did not get their morality from religion; they already had it.

In fact, you don’t have to be human to have a sense of profound reverence for life. Homo naledi, a four-and-one-half foot tall humanoid with a brain the size of a grapefruit, scooped out bowl shaped depressions, meticulously laid down their dead relatives in a curled fetal position, and reverently pulled back the soil over their dead. These first known burials happened deep within an almost impenetrable cave outside Johannesburg, South Africa over 200,000 years ago.

Religion was helpful in that it attempted to give understanding to events and natural occurrences humans could not otherwise explain. It is natural to invent a God of the Volcano, Vulcan for the Romans, or Pele for the Hawaiians, and give the god human characteristics. So here comes this animal not knowing anything except a banana taste good, and it grows and explores, and makes up stuff for a supplement to its understanding and discards old beliefs and grows and thinks and sees, changing with each generation, sometimes regressing, sometimes leaping forward.

And so, at some point, and we don’t know when, with the footprints in the sand, with the stencil of the hand, with a circle of megalithic stones, mankind was the animal that became aware that he lives within a universe. At that moment, for the first time in all of existence, the universe became conscious of itself. Mankind is the only vehicle that allows the universe, the stars, the galaxies, the dark matter, all of it, to be aware of itself, that provides the Cosmos with its consciousness. This is the case for humanity.

Coming next week: The further case for humanity