Celebrating Our Common Humanity

It was 72 years ago on this date that a group of teenagers came across the now-famous cave paintings in Lascaux, France.  I’ve always regarded this discovery as integral to the path on which Homo sapiens finds itself: gradually coming to see that our common humanity is a far more important feature of our species than our surface-level differences. 

Here we find evidence that a group of people, whose ancestors had left Eastern Africa about 30,000 years ago, wound up in France about 13,000 years later. They huddled together, frightened of the unknown; they hunted for food; they told stories; they cared for one another; they looked into the heavens and wondered about what was out there; they formulated theories to explain the deep mysteries of what they saw. 

Hundreds of generations later, we have more sophistication in the way we go about our business, but we’re the same in so many remarkable ways.