The best evidence we have is that life began on Earth about 4 billion years ago. Plant species evolved by natural selection for over 3 billion years, but there were no animals for those billions of years. The first evidence we have of animal life occurred about 600 million years ago, during the Cambrian explosion. That animal life also evolved by natural selection, producing our common chimpanzee ancestor 5 million years ago. Hominids, the predecessors of humans, evolved about 4 million years ago. Our immediate antecessor, Homo erectus, appeared 1.5 million years ago. Homo sapiens finally was seen 400,000 years ago. Although there is still significant discussion about the site of origin for Homo sapiens, most bets currently are in Africa. Our ancestors stayed in Africa for several hundred thousand years. Rather suddenly, 40,000 years ago, there was migration out of Africa and colonization of the entire world. Humans now exist on every continent of the world, and in some of them, in great multitude.
In spite of this rapid colonization of humans over the entire face of our planet Earth, we have pretty much led separate lives for most of that 40,000 years. Different ethnicity has developed, with humans of different appearance by color and stature, as each colony has adapted the best to its environment. Different nations and nation-states have developed, each with a different set of morals that best fits its own particular society. By 8000 BCE, great city-states began to develop, each wielding great power in its own region. Commerce rapidly developed between these centers of political power, and trade of goods was common. Yet there was not any great mingling of peoples. Each was its own separate civilization, each with its own set of rules, laws, punishments and rewards. In this semi-isolation, different religions have also developed, each with conflicting views about exactly how humans should lead their lives, and in particular, significantly conflicting beliefs about their God and the ways humans should express reverence towards their God. That hasn’t mattered a great deal until recent history. Each of these major religions has prospered and grown, going through its own internal turmoil, but not constantly doing battle with each other. This isolation has now ended, as the result of four major revolutions in human communication.
The foundation for these dramatic changes occurred about one million years ago. Human speech began. Up to that time, we will suppose that hominids communicated rather well with grunts, guttural shows of emotion and gestures, but they did not have the capability of forming multiple words which could be reformed in different arrangements to convey multiple different messages. That required a series of anatomic changes which are found only in the human species. The larynx deepened, allowing the lungs to be used as a bellows, the vocal cords as vibrators and the pharynx as a resonator. The mouth was freed from food gathering, so that the lips, teeth and tongue could be used as articulators. Unilateral brain dominance occurred, with an isolated speech center on one side, a change found only in humans. This was a remarkable change in human life. Ideas could now be exchanged freely and accumulated knowledge transmitted from one generation to another. Certain members of each tribe became wise ones or priests, entrusted with this dissemination of knowledge to the young of that tribe. There was not as yet great sharing of that knowledge between one tribe and another.
The second of these revolutions in human speech began about 5500 BCE. Written language appeared. It was at first only pictorial. Certain symbols were used to represent a hand, foot, spear, animal, tree, etc. Some languages today, such as Chinese, is still mostly pictorial, a complex symbol representing a word. By 3000 BCE, in multiple civilizations, those symbols had become simplified enough that they could be gathered together in syllables, which in different groupings represented different sounds. Since there were not yet vowels, the intention of logo-syllabic writing was many times unclear, as is evident in our attempts to interpret biblical writing. The genius of the Greeks was to develop separate letters, both vowels and consonants, which can be used in nearly endless rearrangements, each of them forming an idea or concept which have mostly the same meaning both for the expresser and the recipient. Knowledge could not only be transmitted, it could be stored.
The third revolution in human speech was the invention of the printing press in 1439. Up to this time, written language was laboriously reproduced by scribes and the transmission of that knowledge pretty much confined to the learned few, who could read and write. The vast majority of the population remained illiterate and ignorant. With the easy availability of written language, the pressures on the entire population to become literate became immense. There was an explosion of knowledge, available to all humans everywhere, if they could read.
The fourth revolution in human speech has occurred in our time, with telecommunications around the world, and now, most importantly, the world wide web. My auto mechanic communicates daily, without charge, with his wife, who is serving in a mission field in Thailand. She is involved in a program to rescue early teen-age girls from being sold into the sex trade by their families. We are all potentially in contact with all others on this globe, so that none of us is isolated, unless there is political and economic suppression to prevent us from doing so. This is not to say that there is not still significant isolation. There certainly is. Yet we have become one world. All nations have borders against other nations. All ethnic groups are juxtaposed against other ethnic groups. All moral systems are brought face to face against the moral systems of other cultures. All religions find themselves confronting other religions. All of us, given economic circumstances sufficient to allow us to do so, are able to communicate with all others around the globe. When Americans call for technical support for their computers, they are calling India. Satellites allow the broadcast of information from any part of the globe to any other part of the globe. Human isolation is for the most part gone, and our religions are no longer able to preach their doctrines of intolerance without severe conflict with all other religions.
The three religions of Abraham, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, need their own revelation and revolution. They need to understand that they can no longer let the conservative elements of their religions preach rabid intolerance and hate towards all others who do not share their particular mythology. They need to understand that they should emphasize the morals of their religions, and not their myths of superiority. That time has ended. That emphasis on individual mythology, to the exclusion of all other mythology, has plunged us all into violent conflict. We are now one world. It is time we realize that we are all brothers and sisters, and banded together in one common cause. It is time we realize our religious faiths are myths, and not fact, before we foolishly destroy each other.