The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

by Daniel Gardner

The transformation of the human brain into its modern form occurred entirely during the “Old Stone Age”—the Paleolithic era that lasted from roughly two million years ago until the introduction of agriculture some 12,000 years ago. Not that the advent of agriculture suddenly transformed how most people lived. It took thousands of years for the new way of life to spread, and it was only 4,600 years ago that the first city—not much more than a town by modern standards—was founded. If the history of our species were written in proportion to the amount of time we lived at each stage of development, two hundred pages would be devoted to the lives of nomadic hunter-gatherers. One page would cover agrarian societies. The world of the last two centuries—the modern world—would get one short paragraph at the end. Our brains were simply not shaped by life in the world as we know it now, or even the agrarian world that preceded it. They are the creation of the Old Stone Age. And since our brains really make us what we are, the conclusion to be drawn from this is unavoidable and a little unsettling. We are cavemen. Or cavepersons, if you prefer. Whatever the nomenclature, we sophisticated moderns living in a world of glass, steel, and fiber optics are no different, in a fundamental sense, than the prehistoric humans for whom campfires were the latest in high tech and bison hides were haute couture.