Disentangling humans: Genetics and environment as the basis of explaining the self and society

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Disentangling Humans

Genetics and environment as the basis of explaining the self and society

Yiorgos Apidianakis Ph.D. © 2023

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Summary | This is a bold, thought-provoking exploration of the gaps in our understanding of the ethical, philosophical, and political ramifications of our genetics and how they are shaped by our environments.

Disentangling humans synthesizes life and social sciences, and the humanities, into a philosophical understanding of humans in terms of wellbeing, sociality and ethics.

Drawing from the fields of classical genetics, evolutionary biology and sociopsychology, and infused with references to classic literature and popular art, Dr Apidianakis examines the following questions through the lenses of DNA:

1. Is it more meaningful to predict the disease prospects of each individual or to indiscriminately prevent disease from happening?

2. Are there biological limits in achieving the humanitarian ideal of human equality? That is, are there inerasable inequalities among people?

3. Can we be determined by our genes and environments and still be responsible for our actions?

4. Are we more behaviorally free when following our hearts or when planning for the future?

5. When we punish people, should we be aiming to pacify the victim or rectify the prospective perpetrator?

6. Which should guide our politics and ethics, our ideals or our universal behavioral attributes?

7. What does it mean to be human?

The book is a flow of ten interlinked chapters intended for the scholar, the student, and the layperson alike. It is a source of information and arguments helping to understand the human condition from the perspective of genetics..

[ 1. SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Genetics & Genomics 2. SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Evolution

3. SCIENCE / Essays 4. SCIENCE / History 5. SCIENCE / Study & Teaching ]

1st edition: January 2023

ISBN-13 (paperback) | 978-9925-601-26-4

Foreword | Our phenotypes, the observable manifestations of our traits, deserve explanations  

Having the essentially complete sequence of the human genome is similar to having all the pages of a manual needed to make the human body. The challenge to researchers and scientists now is to determine how to read the contents of all these pages and then understand how the parts work together and to discover the genetic basis for health and the pathology of human disease. 

USA Human Genome Research Institute 

Our relation to our environments can be viewed philosophically as embracing our oneness with everything. Buddhism prompts us to reduce our personal suffering by disengaging from our phenotypes, that is, our appearances, bodily sensations, feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and our self-consciousness. Detaching ourselves from our looks, bodily pleasures, false perceptions, biased thinking and the illusion of a constant self is advice, offered in harmonious agreement by Buddhism and western medicine alike, against unnecessary mental suffering. The sciences, however, emphasize understanding our phenotypes, seeing them as internal complexities that need to be explained through the readings of our Books of Genesis by the environment. 

From Phenotype to Endotype

Phenotype: description of how one looks, functions, behaves.

Endotype: biological (genome by environmental history) explanation of how one looks, functions, behaves.

Genome: a copy of the total DNA of an organism.

Environmental History: all the experiences of an organism from its first cell and on.

Are we healthy or very healthy? And when sick, are we just sick or very sick? While we are making an increasingly good job in measuring our phenotypes, we are still lagging behind in explaining our endotypes, the mechanisms that shape the phenotypes. Every human Book of Genesis contains 46 pages of around a hundred million letters each. Within these pages we see patterns of letters we call genes, and there are around twenty thousand different protein-coding genes for every human. All these genes exist in almost all humans. Most are the same in all people, but a small number of them - less than 1 percent of the total - vary slightly from person to person. Cases of people totally missing a gene are rare and may be manifested as disorders, but most genetic variation relates to fine differences in the efficiency of protein-coding genes and their regulation telling our proteins where, when, how much and in what way they will be expressed. The usually small person-to-person variations in our Books of Genesis are noted by our environments and result in rather small biochemical, cellular and physiological changes in our phenotypes. Genetic and environmental factors, thus, underlie our phenotypes and most of them do not work in an on vs. off mode, but are rather gradual and subtle in their operation. Measuring the underlying factors reveals our hidden endotypes, which equal our more obvious phenotypes. Quantifying phenotypes and endotypes simultaneously is to deal with both parts of our lives’ equations, which dictate that every Phenotype equals the reading of the letters of our Genome within our Books of Genesis by our environmental History.  

Becoming competent in measuring our endotypes helps to distinguish health from disease, but also finding why we are the way we are at all levels. Our appearances, bodily sensations, feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness, while still malleable, are inherited through our Books of Genesis, which are read and interpreted by environments that happened to be around. In essence we are one with everything that was historically around us, and our books and our mental eyes lie in the center of it. The story I am telling in twelve chapters is about the quantitative human condition and the victorious coupling of our instinctively individualistic, abstract and deeply flawed human thinking with our social cooperation instincts. It sums up all the seeds the curious mind wants to find in the realm of the sciences and the humanities that distinguish humans from one another and the other animals.  

An analogy between Books & the Scripts of life

Gene ≈ a word on a page (a heritable DNA unit of information within a genome)

Chromosome ≈ a page of a book (a block of DNA encoding some of the genes and their regulators)

Genome ≈ all pages of a book (a collection of all chromosomes of an organism)

Cell ≈ a book (a functional unit of life carrying a copy of the complete genome)

Organism ≈ an orderly array of books (an orderly array of cells forming a higher order of life)

Society ≈ a library of books (organisms of the same species living organized together)

1 | Why genetics should matter to me: The reading of the Human Book of Genesis is environmentally biased

How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?

Salman Rushdie

There are two things we trust too much: what we think and what the people around us are saying. Questioning is key towards a sound understanding of anything, especially if the question is burdened by strong biases as is our perspective of the self. The term human condition can be taken to include all the characteristics and key events of human life. It is often viewed as the collection of human experiences and their perception through consciousness. In that sense the human condition may have positive and negative connotations pertaining to human joy, happiness, suffering and misery. However, the study of human life pertains primarily to biology. No one can claim to understand humans without a good sense of our biology. The human condition can thus be taken to include all human attributes bodily and mental that distinguish us from one another as well as from animals and computers.

What distinguishes us the most from all other animals is our higher ability to think abstractly and coordinate our actions consciously at the personal and societal level. Similar to other animals, but unlike computers that share only our ability for computational reasoning, we are driven by desires, impulses and instincts. Desires are mostly the result of genetics, brain wiring and the epigenetic imprinting of the environment on our Books of Genesis, that is, our DNA. Our bodily and mental person-to-person differences stem from small variations in our DNA and our personal histories that read our Books of Genesis aloud bringing their contents to life. Harsh environments are like illiterate scholars unable to read DNA towards being. However, all living creatures face an environment the fluency of which makes much of the difference we see among peoples. Depending on the feature at stake our Books of Genesis bind the reader more or less closely to their narrative. Therefore, to know humans is to decipher the readings of the personal and societal Books of Genesis by the environmental history.

I find it incredible that all it takes to understand one human or many regarding any aspect of life, ranging from disease to intelligence and behavior as well as wellbeing, is a close look at the reading of the Books of Genesis by the environment. The catch is that the Books are ancient and barely understood. The reading of their archaic language is like the approximate phonetic values of syllabic signs used in Linear A, which are known, while the language itself remains unknown. Considering the current progress in decoding our DNA I do not see why its language should remain unknown forever. In the meantime, clear messages hidden in our Books of Genesis and our environmental histories are readily available. I discuss key messages in chapter 2 (the role of the environment in people’s prosperity), chapter 3 (human health), chapters 4 and 5 (human intelligence and behavior, respectively), chapter 6 (human culture and way of thinking), chapters 7 and 8 (consciousness and biased thinking) and chapters 9 and 10 (happiness and meaning of life). Two addenda are offered in the end for readers interested into the historical events and milestones that shaped the field of genetics. These extra chapters can be read in advance or later on and provide a historical perspective and a thorough understanding of Mendelian (qualitative) and Galtonian (quantitative) genetics and their admixture.

Human genetics is the study of our individual books of genesis. Every organism starts with a single book (a cell) and a reader (its environment) that uses the book as a manual to build life. The human book contains 46 colorful pages (called chromosomes), amounting to six billion letters in total. Environments read each book from its conception and on and interpret it their own way. Books eventually come in many nearly identical copies within the library of our bodies, instructing the environmental readers to do one thing and another and how much of each. Environmental readers are never objective. They are opinionated speakers, reading our books and constructing life according to the building blocks available and the fitness of the construction within its surroundings. The end result is an ever-changing organism that grows, takes shape and decays along with its copies of book of genesis that are placed in bookshelves or stacks, called tissues and organs, and within the earthly environment that harbors and interprets these copies.

Not only do the environmental readers shape an organism rather stochastically, but also the organism can mold its readers. All life forms, big or small, are endowed with the potential to change their environment and be changed by it. A primary example of this took place approximately two and a half billion years ago when bacteria started to develop the oxygen-bearing atmosphere we have today, but also the ozone layer that protects DNA against mutations caused by excessive ultraviolet radiation. The footprint of living organisms on each other and on their environments is not restricted to humans, but certainly includes all humans.

How human genomes are organized in books and how bookworm and circumstantial readers shape and interpret their words and letters giving them physical and behavioral forms is of fundamental importance and a subject of scientific and public debate. Understanding how our books and our readers shape life is paramount in biology, medicine, agriculture, philosophy and politics. Younger humans naturally assume that all possibilities are within one’s reach. We pass or fail one test after the other as we grow, striving to realize our desires, our talents, and the opportunities that suit us. We mostly accept that our genes and our environments define our talents and our opportunities, but we go on to believe that personal drive and desires are totally in our own hands.

I grew up considering myself bestowed with physical and mental talents that I could exploit according to available opportunities. I saw all of my life-defining choices being made by my mental process, my thinking. Liking sports earnestly enough, I subjected myself during late adolescence to daily competitive training and contemplated following a career is sports academy, but then prioritized joining Biology School instead. I contemplated following human genetics as a field of study, but then decided to perform my undergrad and graduate studies in the field of developmental genetics. Being accustomed to this field I secured an appointment for postdoctoral studies in the UK, but in less than a month I aimed working on host-microbe interaction at Harvard Medical School, where I stayed for six years as a postdoctoral fellow and four years as an instructor in medicine. While mentally prepared for an academic job in the US, I took yet another turn accepting a professorship appointment in the southeastern corner of Europe, the island of Cyprus, specializing in biomedical genetics.

I didn’t consciously appreciate biology or scientific research during my high school studies. Why then did I follow a career path in biomedical research instead of gymnastics? Are my motives any different from those of scientists describing themselves by saying they always wanted to be scientists? Was my path really chosen by me, or was it a pile of random choices affected by the environment I grew up in? Or was I actually driven by some internal forces leading me all along towards what I am today? Never actually contemplating following the branches of my path for too long, was my path really my decision? Can I even assume I can desire whatever I want for that matter? Is there a limit to what I am, other than what my book of life and the random bookworm readers make of it?

In retrospect, I can see my path as a logical step-by-step process from day zero to now. As Søren Kierkegaard once said: Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. But this admission does not resolve my main question: Is human physiology and behavior determined by anything more than our books of genesis and their reading by our environmental circumstances?

My question thus is predisposed to consider our gaps in understanding the ethical, philosophical and political ramifications of genetics and the environment. Claims on the importance of genetic human purity are not only scientifically wrong, but also understandably accused of misguiding society towards racism. However, the question of what makes people and societies thrive needs to be publicly understood, despite our increasing level of knowledge specialization. Science incessantly relies on more and more specialized concepts, models, and methods. Although unavoidable, specialization has its dark side for it creates boundaries and obscures composition. Specialization leads to unbridgeable gaps between the humanities and the sciences, to the detriment of multifaceted understanding. We know more and more about smaller and smaller things that many times we gain in depth, but we lose the big picture. We seek human happiness, but we forsake our biology. We strive to understand human intelligence based on genetics and learning, but we do not focus on their interaction. We hail our humanitarian ethics, but we forget they are biased, human, and many times temporary. We spend billions to study disease, but we fail to comprehend the societal forces behind innovation. We question the motives but not the biological programing of the murderer or the humanitarian. We see beauty being compromised by deciphering its hidden recipe. We understand how the planets move, but we worry this understanding might stop moving us.

Remaining unbridgeable, an ever-expanding specialization becomes detached from societal needs. Close monitoring of developments in genome research, artificial intelligence, bioethics and philosophy is a daunting but necessary task. However, interdisciplinary thinking moving beyond conventional research frameworks is more likely to receive objections. While challenging, it is essential to effectively integrate scientific knowledge on climate change, biodiversity, public education, human health and economic policy, or understand the cause, significance and political action towards inequalities within and between nations. The synthesis of different scientific fields with an emphasis on contemporary global problems, such as the march of artificial intelligence, the impact of climate change in human health and economy, the distinction of human ideals on an individual, national and global level, is imperative. Recent epidemics make it clear that global and national economy and politics, epidemiology and empathy need to be equally respected to the right for human-to-human and business-to-business and country-to-country competition. Not because someone says so, but because – as I will try to make clear – it is only human to do so; and, actually, human at its best.

Tackling such challenges may not only be beneficial to societies and the laymen, but also intellectually rewarding in providing new perspectives and the synthesis of ideas stemming from different fields of knowledge. The collision of different schools of thinking can be anything but trivial, however, it may emphasize the universal character of human knowledge. Not limiting a scientist or thinker to the conventional limits of his field, drawing instead inspiration and conceptual and methodological tools from different fields is a sign of open-mindedness and scientific originality. Genetics has provided a vivid example of how theoretical scholarly work can be combined with experimental approach, mathematical and statistical modeling and evaluation, in an economical, medical, human intellect, behavioral, philosophical and political framework. Evaluating our individual books of genesis based on their interactions with diverse environments is to reinterpret in the 21st century the human condition, rather than to idealize or condemn human nature.

In the following pages I argue against the black vs. white type of distinctions. I explain that the traits of all living organisms, and thus of humans too, are essentially quantitative. Unlike the layman view of genetic traits being divided into qualitative, as for example telling black from white, and quantitative, as in telling there is a continuum of light intensity from no light to dim, medium and very strong light, most traits have a quantitative character (can be quantified), although frequently and conveniently our brains conceive them similar to social dichotomies. We are accustomed to distinctions of the type us vs. them and good vs. bad, but actually at some level most traits can be quantitatively defined. We see our cholesterol levels as optimal or suboptimal, but in reality we are talking about a biochemical threshold set by scientists as a guide towards the probability of disease.

Far from being all about genetics or mathematics my effort is to provide a synthesis of biology with the social sciences and the humanities through the scope of the book of genesis and its environmental readers and interpreters. To build a synthesis one may choose to use only common language that can seemingly be easier to understand, but may lack rigor in defining and relating different concepts. Discussing a conceptual equation instead helps to avoid the oversimplification or vagueness of the everyday language. I focus this approach to variations of an equation describing the phenotypes of each and every individual, such as cancer predisposition, intelligence or behavior, and deployment the same equation to describe cumulative societal traits, such as a country’s innovation index, due to the cooperative input of its people over time. The universality of the phenotypic equation comes from its applicability as the full expression of our genomes and our multifaceted personal and societal environmental history. To illustrate the importance of this I would like to remind the reader that language is a means to an end, a way to express our thoughts. But it is also a vessel, a way to carry our thoughts from our brain to another person’s brain. Vessels, however, have a shape, so they shape our thoughts and arguments sometimes logically and artistically and sometimes arbitrarily. While mathematical functions should make sense the same way in every language and every reasonable mind, the way we address our argument varies. This variation in approach aims to make the arguments of this book more rigorous, and memorable. To be fair to the expert and the layman alike, my thoughts and language strive to be simple, but accurate, and a way to do this is to provide the basic science concepts and an elementary and abstract level of mathematical understanding within the two following chapters. Although reading the book chapters in order provides a sense of continuity among all aspects of human life, each chapter is autonomous in its content and can be read in isolation from the others.

Classical genetics officially starts with the publication of the seminal work of Gregor Mendel in 1866, which provides the first valid to this day basis of understanding of the rules of inheritance and in parallel with the book Hereditary Genius published by Francis Galton in 1869, a prequel of quantitative assessment of hereditary human traits. A century of follow up work led to the discovery of DNA as the hereditary material with its structure resolved in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick. As a result, the chapter of classical genetics was closed, relaying genetics to the molecular era. University level teachings worldwide, and textbooks on Genetics now shuffle a fixed and given information. I argue that key questions about humans pertaining to classical genetics are still open, awaiting not only our modern molecular techniques, but also an intellectual framework to approach them:

Which methodological approach is more insightful in explaining human traits, the Mendelian view of humans as individuals or the Galtonian view of humans as populations?

How should we target cancer prevention, via gene forms and environments that are unique in each person or via a universal application of clinical screenings?

Was Cavalli-Sforza right in viewing peoples as being genetically comparable or Charles Murray in viewing peoples genetically apart?

Richard Lewontin and Edward O. Wilson, Harvard professors, both born in 1929 and both died in 2021. They debated each other since 1975 till the end of their lives about the control of human behavior by genes. Who was right?

Are there biological limits in achieving the humanitarian ideal of human equality? That is, are there inerasable inequalities among people?

Can we be partially or fully determined by our genes or environments and still responsible for our actions?

When are we more behaviorally free, when we follow our heart or when we plan for the future?

Should pride, praise, shame and punishment aim to do justice to the past or to design a better future?

What does it mean to be human? What is more of an objective guide for our politics and ethics, our ideals or our universal behavioral attributes?

Providing better answers to these questions is to follow our environmental history and its instructions by our Books of Genesis in accordance with worldviews provided by the humanities. The central theme of this book is that genome by environment interaction provides a basis of understanding humans in terms of wellbeing, sociality and ethics.

2 | Peoples Prosperity: The Book of Genesis is read by the Environment, but is interpreted based on Environmental History

We have our personal history and our common history. Why study them? Is our common history related to the personal? The short answer is, yes of course! Common history shapes our personal histories allowing our lives to develop within a specific environment. Our own history in turn rarely makes world news, but is of outmost importance in the making of what we are and may become part of our common history via its cumulative contribution to societal affairs. Personal history entails all but our genetic blueprint, our Book of Genesis, and is a necessary parameter in measuring the self. It includes all our experiences physical and mental from the starting point as one-cell organisms in the womb of our mothers all the way through development and aging to the present time. Our environmental history is linked to our cultural exposures, which inevitably include the story of our ancestors and the legacies we inherited from our family, community, city, country and the globe. Understanding our exposures is relevant to our biology and health. Moreover, understanding our common history helps us to formulate a worldview, a framework on which our life is based. The more objective this framework is the more accurately we may understand the world and ourselves. History paints us a detailed picture of how societies develop economically, technologically and politically to the present as a sequence of potentially causal events. Which environmental exposures make major impacts in our lives is necessary to find in determining what we are and how to approach our future. Common history provides paradigms and patterns with which we can identify and try to mimic, and others that we may find aversive and become inclined to avoid. Part of understanding the world is to understand other societies and compare their ways with ours. That is, we get a view of the world in time and space and by doing so we get a better understanding of how things change. As difficult as it may be to recollect seemingly important events and identify similarities with previous situations, as well as, to break down complex events into simpler ones contributing to an end, to synthesize such key events towards such an end and to use of all that to understand the present, is a necessary journey towards understanding of the self.

Our personal and the common memories are biased. We pass events through our filters retaining the pleasant and the ugly moments that our mind is predisposed to accept. Even historians are prone to this bias, picking up what they consider as highlights and details of importance. Scheming in a scientific way through the details of history cherry-picking what constitutes the essence towards an end is our job to do. I suggest that the most important lessons of history lie in finding the constituents leading to cumulative human knowledge, because knowledge acquisition is a key description and a powerful tool in the wellbeing of Homo sapiens. Cumulative knowledge leads to intellectual and technological progress, which is often discussed for its downsides and the gloomy predicament it may impose to humans. A bad scenario might have been the prospect of progress in the past, due to the rather harsh life of the average farmer and industrial worker, but it is now more of a tangible salvation. It helped the ape we now call Homo sapiens to multiply and progressively move to the present, despite the considerable human suffering in-between. Decoding the downhills and summits of human history can make us better decision makers. The philosopher George Santayana wrote in his 1905 book Reason in Common Sense, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". While apparently true, this quote does not give us enough clues as to what is important to remember and what being condemned really means. One way to proceed is to go through all the volumes of global history in a computational way and find in an objective and holistic way the simplest combination of events that, when grouped together, suffice to explain what lies behind every human milestone. Such computer modeling should then bear an analogy with weather forecasting. There are three different scales of weather forecasting: the one week forecasts most people are interested in to guide themselves towards everyday tasks; the seasonal expectations dealing with the average temperatures for each place and time of the year, which may assist travel and business planning; and the long, over the many years trend related to global warming or cooling. In analogy to these three scales in time and place one may choose to study the short- or long-term parameters of history to deduct the cause and subsequent effect. The news, for example, may be a guide to what one should plan for the day or the following days. This daily information has its practical value, but it is by its very nature, perishable. One can also get into more in-depth information, digging into the local and global politics and plan his or her business accordingly. Undoubtedly, history can be of help in this case in comparing the past with the present situations. But there are no guarantees in planning, because every time is different. Even if one situation is seemingly replicated, chances are the outcome will be different and sometimes very different the next time around. So one should always process with the risks in mind. Lastly, there are these milestones in our history that seem like necessary constituents of the events that follow. These are usually coincidences. Having two things happening at the same time or even in sequence is no guarantee that they are causally linked in any practically informative sense. Saying for example that democracy brings prosperity sounds reasonable, but it is wrong. Even if democracy makes most people feel better, it is more of a gift or an indicator of prosperity, rather than its driving force. Just look how regionally and transiently democracy appeared at the geographical and time scale throughout history, how fragile it was and how late it is popping up again along the three and a half thousand years since its emergence. During its infancy democracy was coming and going within a period of less than 500 years and only locally in ancient Greece or Rome. Empires were coming and going over the millennia in all continents in the total absence of democracy. Ironically, Alexander the Great, who was much-appraised for his strategic abilities to conquer foreign land and keeping it by mixing the traditions of conquered people with those of the Greeks, was also one of the Macedonian kings suppressing Athenian democracy. We have to move fast forward towards the year 2000 AD to reach an equal number of democracies and autocracies in the world. At 1900 AD we only had a few democracies and very many autocracies worldwide. If you had asked me at that time what is the role of democracy in human progress, I would be wrong in today’s standards to say something like this: "Democracy appears unnecessary for humanity. It seems we are doing ok without it. Moreover, not knowing enough biology, I would get into the intellectual realm of those times to ponder something like this: Communism seems to be the best political system to protect human dignity and meaning of life. Without it humans are prone to massive exploitation and emotional misery". One century later, history would have proven me wrong. This indicates how difficult long-term predictions are if insufficiently informed. Claiming to have this extra knowledge now, I will give it a try.

Those that hate you the most sometimes speak the naked truth, at least in part. George Carlin has said "look how stupid the average person is, and think that half people are stupider than that". The truth though is that we are not stupid compared to animals; we are definitely smarter, as in having a higher ability to process information and making inferences. We are just sometimes stupider than we think. Moreover, we are not more stupid now than in previous times, but we get smarter, worldwide. Let’s not be fooled by temporary myopic anomalies. We are measurably smarter on average than any other era in our global history. So, our democracies can be more and smarter as well. Being cumulatively smarter, gathering knowledge and hunting for innovation, we bring wealth to ourselves. Wealth then translates into prosperity tentatively allowing the luxury of a democracy. Democracy is like a cherry on the big pie of intellectual and technological progress. Whether this fairytale is based on a true story is for humanity to tell. But here is the story, the brief story from the scope of history, biology and sociology. I will be stopping at times to ask the crucial question:

Which race is winning the race

of technological and military progress, and why?

Are we rationally allowed to suspect that some peoples were smarter than others of their time? It is logical to assume that the higher than animals human ability to process information and make inferences is critical to our intellectual and technological progress and the ability of peoples to dominate one another. Similarly, it is reasonable to assume that humans are not equally endowed in brainy aptitudes. But can this extend to differences among societies in each continent? I suggest the reader ponders on the following coverage of human history and evaluate the hypothesis that above average minds of their times must have made the difference we eventually see printed on the world map through the ages.

A brief look at the global human history provides a clear sense of the link between climate, ecology and the rise and the fall of civilizations. Homo sapiens was definitely spread all around Africa 200,000 years ago, but up to 3300BC no one left any written record of what humans of that time did. This era is called the Stone Age or pre-history, and the information about human civilizations back then is scarce. Africa would be a hotspot for remarkable civilizations to arise by having a head start, the benefit of harboring the first humans, as we genetically know them. But no such benefit for Africans over peoples in other continents ever materialized. Knowing this we would scratch our heads clueless at that point, but later on in this chapter some clear answers will be given.

Towards the end of pre-history gradual aridification at global scale caused the migration to river valleys and potentially changed human behavior. Around 3300 BC, five thousand years after the start of agriculture, something close to magic happened: writing and written records started to appear. That was the Early Bronze Age lasting from 3300 to 2200 BC. Eurasians were using bronze and people in Egypt, in Sumer (today’s Iraq) and in the Indus Valley (today’s Pakistan) knew how to write. People were also building pyramids in Egypt and early trade routes connected different settlements. Sumerians were using the plough, the sail and the wheel, and later invented mathematics (algebra and geometry). Native Indians of the Chico civilization (today’s Peru) were making buildings, but these were relatively undeveloped.

Which race is winning the race of toolmaking so far?

All Eurasian civilizations (Egyptian, Sumerian and Indus Valley) were stranded above the line of the tropics of Cancer, while the Chico civilization was the only one in the southern hemisphere and in between the tropics of Capricorn and the equator, that is, within the tropical zone, where the sun lies above your head one or more days of the year. If this is good for progress, Chico people might be winning the race. If avoiding the sun above your head is good, then we must give an advantage to one of the other peoples. The fact that the Chico were relatively underdeveloped at those times, indicates that their chances