Yesterday, I was watching a documentary about the oldest surviving wooden fragments ever found while washing dishes. The narrator on the video said something that stayed with me: there should be a Wood Age in our history books, but there isn’t one, simply because wood does not preserve well. There are not enough artifacts. Wood rots. Stone remains.
That single thought opened up something much larger for me.
When we think about history, our understanding is almost entirely built around the first civilizations. Writing. Stone cities. Records. That moment is often treated as the beginning of humanity itself, as if everything before it was just a blur of primitive existence. But the truth is that there is so much more time before that point than after it.
The oldest stone tools we know of are about 3.3 million years old. For a long time, it was believed that only humans could make and use stone tools, but even that idea has been overturned. Anatomically modern humans emerged around 300,000 years ago, which already leaves a vast gap between early humanoids and us that we barely understand. And then there is another enormous gap between modern humans and the first civilizations, which appeared only about 5,000 years ago.
That is hundreds of thousands of years of human existence that we mostly dismiss.
When people imagine those times, they often picture brainless creatures wandering around caves, barely surviving. But that image makes no sense. These were people who survived entirely in nature, without any modern systems backing them up. They could not call for help. They could not rely on infrastructure. If they wanted to move from one island to another, they climbed into a small wooden boat and took the risk. If something went wrong, that was it. No rescue. No helicopters. No second chances.
And yet they thrived for hundreds of thousands of years. If they had not, we would not exist.
They invented tools. First from wood, then stone. Later humans recreated those same tools in copper, iron, and eventually steel. The core ideas did not change. Only the materials did. Human progress, in many ways, has been about replacing tools with more durable versions of themselves.
And now, in our time, we have replaced many tools altogether. We use money instead.
Money is a tool that allows us to outsource almost everything. If your internet breaks, you call your provider and someone appears at your door to fix it. You do not need the skill. You do not need the knowledge. The system handles it for you. In that sense, it feels almost magical.
But that magic has a cost.
If the system fails, we are helpless. If the internet goes down, online banking stops working, electricity goes out, or a storm disrupts infrastructure, entire nations can grind to a halt. You cannot buy food without money. You cannot call for help without a phone. Even if you have rations for a short time, what happens when they run out?
We are no longer equipped to survive on our own.
This makes the contrast with our ancestors even sharper. They depended on community, yes, but they were individually competent in ways most of us are not anymore. And yet we give them almost no credit. We dismiss them because they did not leave stone cities behind.
We define civilization by writing. But even that definition is flawed.
Socrates himself believed that writing would corrupt the mind, that it would weaken memory and diminish true thinking. And yet the only reason we know anything about Socrates is because Plato wrote about him. The great thinker who distrusted writing survives only through writing.
That paradox alone should make us question how we measure intelligence.
Writing preserves ideas, but it also freezes them. It allows power to shape narratives, to rewrite history, to polish facts until they are palatable. Again and again, archaeology has shown us that what we believed for centuries was incomplete or simply wrong.
Take the Vikings as an example. We were taught that they were barbaric, uncivilized savages. But contemporary records from Britain show something very different. Local men complained that Vikings were well groomed, hygienic, and well mannered, and that women preferred them. That part of the story did not survive. What survived was the version written by those who felt threatened by them.
History is always moving. Every year, new discoveries force us to revise what we thought we knew. And yet, despite this, many people still imagine our ancestors as primitive cave dwellers, when the truth is that we do not know who they really were.
What we do know is this: they gave us everything.
They survived where survival was brutal. They adapted without systems. They built the foundations upon which every later invention rests. Without them, there would be no tools, no cities, no writing, no money, no internet, no modern world at all.
And yet we rarely thank them.
I don’t think we are measuring intelligence correctly. We privilege records over resilience, permanence over competence, stone over wood, writing over memory. We erase entire chapters of humanity simply because they did not fossilize well.
But intelligence existed long before writing. Civilization existed long before cities. And survival itself may be the highest form of intelligence there is.
The least we can do is acknowledge that.