Why were they stuck for so long? I’d suggest that they weren’t stuck at all; they were home. If necessity is the mother of invention, why is it so hard for us to surmise that they were happy and comfortable—without any apparent need for “progress”? In our world, where the present is habitually dismissed as a staging area to a better future, and disinformation concerning the long prehistory of our species is ubiquitous, it’s hard to acknowledge that our ancestors’ lives weren’t solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, or short. It’s nearly impossible for us to conceive that they could have been happy to
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