X Character Flaws That Made Human Beings What They Are Today

Most of us are taught from a young age what it takes to be a good person. Be confident and independent, eat right and wash behind your ears our parents tell us. It’s all fine advice for those living in the modern world, but if our ancient ancestors had followed it we’d probably still be hanging out in the forest munching chiggers off each other’s backs. Turns out in order to become nature’s biggest winners, we first had to act like pretty big losers.


Gluttony

Today’s world is one in which it’s possible to legitimately purchase fried chicken filled donuts, given you accept the fact you’ll likely be stealthily filmed from the neck down when buying one for the local news’ latest “obesity epidemic” cover story. Should we feel guilty about our eating habits, or has humanity actually benefited from our hardwired urge to cover with gravy and devour anything dropped in front of us?

The thing is, there are plenty of animals that eat simple, healthy, plant-based diets, and for the most part, they don’t tend to be particularly bright.

Dumb, yet delicious.

Most of the planet’s sharper animals are, like humans, essentially scavengers, as a certain amount of intelligence and long-term memory is required to remember, for instance, which berries are a tasty treat and which will make you shit your intestines inside-out. Once a species develops this basic intelligence it becomes infinitely more resilient and able to adapt to new ecosystems. Just compare rats, which will be around long after we’ve killed each other off, because they’re willing to eat filth, to those snooty bamboo-munching pandas who probably won’t survive another decade. If you want to make it big as a species, your dignity has to be the first thing to go. Now, let’s piss off some vegetarians…

Best to just skip to the next entry vegetarians.

It wasn’t just ancient man’s willingness to shove just about anything in his mouth that contributed to his intelligence--much of it can be attributed to our ancestors starting to consume large quantities of meat and fat. Our large juicy brains consume a huge amount of energy, the kind of energy that could only be provided by big greasy slabs of animal flesh in those primitive pre-high fructose corn syrup times. The hunting of ancient critters also contributed to the creation of the first tools, and strengthened tribal bonds. So chew that gristle with pride friends, turns out it’s brain food.


Bad Hygiene

Scientists have long questioned why human beings evolved to become one of the few mostly hairless mammals on the planet. One leading theory is that our ancestors were dirty little monkeys who lost their hair as a way of escaping rampant parasites, particularly body lice we picked up from gorillas (don’t judge, the Pleistocene period was a crazy, experimental time man).

But how did losing our body hair help us become what we are today? Well now that we no longer had insulating fur covering us, we had to create clothing, and groups living in different areas produced varying levels of pigmentation to protect their exposed skin from the sun, leading to the development of race. Oh, and the need to keep warm may have also contributed to our ancestors learning one other mildly important skill…

The marshmallow was discovered shortly thereafter.

Give those crazy cavemen credit, they knew how to make the best of a bad situation. Most people who catch gorilla crabs these days just end up with a prescription for special shampoo and a lifetime ban from the zoo.

Gossip

It was long thought that human beings developed language to aid in cooperation during hunting, but a new theory suggests that language may not have developed out in the forest with the men, but back around the campfire amongst the gossiping women. The fact that women may have been responsible for language is easy enough to believe considering even today when guys get together their vocabularies don’t seem to extend far beyond the words needed to describe a pair of tits or their buddies’ total gayness.

Clearly female cavepersons were a lot more advanced.

So, ironically what many consider the lowest use of language may have been what led to its creation in the first place, but did gossip have any other positive ramifications? Yes, gossip was absolutely essential in holding together larger more complex human social groups. Most ape societies max out at around 50 members since the primary method of socializing for them is grooming, and picking all the tasty critters off your neighbour’s backside can be a time consuming process. Gossip on the other hand can help you find out who’s been dragging who by the hair to which cave, or who covets whose pile of shiny rocks, much more efficiently, which allowed early man to hold together larger social groups up to around 150 members (gee, that number seems familiar). But why are these larger groups important? Well…


Social Anxiety and Depression

Our brains are about six times too big for an animal our size. Did mankind develop this massive amount of grey matter to help us in our long-standing mission to make mother nature our bitch? It seems unlikely since even animals that aren’t particularly brainy still make out okay in the wild. It’s more probable that humans managed to get a hang of the nature stuff pretty early on, and the real purpose of our huge leap in intelligence was to help us figure out our increasingly large, complex social groups. In other words, trying to navigate the perils of the lunchroom at school probably stimulates your mind more than any of your classes ever will.

Studying the skulls of our ancestors, scientists have found disproportionate growth in the parts of our brains used to construct mental simulations. Being able to play out different situations in your mind and predict possible outcomes is not just essential to surviving the social jungle, it’s also the basis of all problem solving. Basically every scientific or creative breakthrough in human history can trace its roots to some sweaty palmed caveman sitting alone in his hut fretting about whether the other cavemen think he’s cool, and conjuring up fantasies about what it would be like to finally talk to that cavegirl with the shapely brow ridge.

Depression played it’s part too, as some speculate depression evolved as a way to make people separate themselves from the group in times of stress, so they could try to simulate a solution to their problems in peace. So yeah, if your teenager’s being an angsty little punk, don’t worry, they’re actually contributing the betterment of the human race. Well unless they’re goth—everyone knows Goths are an evolutionary dead end.

Scientists suspect the Homo Gothius subspecies were quickly wedgied out of existence.

Refusing to Grow Up

There are few quicker ways to get under a person’s skin than to call them childish. From a young age we’re pressured to be mature, but as it turns out refusing to grow up is a cornerstone of human evolution, so take that mom and dad.

Human childhoods are unique in that we’re born with a massive brain (just ask any woman who’s had to birth one of ‘em) and wriggling vestigial bodies, that grow slowly and don’t really change significantly until puberty. While most animals put all their energy towards quickly growing adult-like bodies, humans instead spend our early years strengthening the pathways in our brains and absorbing information. Our species’ unique ability to pass information and knowledge from one generation to the next, is due to the fact that humans essentially spend 20-years barfing in their offspring’s mouths before they finally kick them from the nest (and even then the barf keeps coming in the form of college tuition, weddings, and their old room again after the divorce).

Cracked.com--validating man-children using science since 2006.

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Drunkenness

As diverse and sometimes conflicting as the world’s countless cultures can be, there’s at least one thing we share—we all love of getting shitfaced. Scientists suspect humans have been boozehounds since our very earliest days when we looked like something you’d hire an exterminator to chase out of your attic. Hell, our bodies are specially designed for alcohol consumption, with portions of our livers specifically designated for metabolizing alcohol. So human beings have been getting tanked for ages, but aside from helping ugly cavemen hook up, has it had any major effect on human progress?

Surprisingly it has. Human beings only truly started to thrive once we developed agriculture, as it allowed us to settle down, found cities and start multiplying like catholic bunnies. Generally it’s been assumed we began farming to provide ourselves with a food source and that brewing alcohol from these plants came later, but some scientists have begun to question whether we might have the timeline backwards. They think we liked getting snookered so much we established agriculture in order to give us plants to brew, and that the whole growing food to feed our children thing was just a happy side effect.

So our entire modern society was founded on getting plastered. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Nathan Birch contributes to the development of the human culture with his webcomic Zoology.