Beyond biblical scripture, it’s unclear at what moment we went from herbivore to carnivore to omnivore, or if indeed we were ever herbivore. What is clear is the carnivore kills and eats the flesh of other creatures. At the microbial level there is all- out warfare all the time, always, everywhere life resides. Ravenous carnivores feeding on their prey, superabundant since their prey survives by extraordinary reproduction. An all-out arms race of deadly appendages and diabolical tactics.
By the time we reached the stone age, we had already harnessed fire and tool use to slaughter our kindred creatures and convert their flesh into easily digested protein- rich fuel to grow even bigger brains and more diabolical appendages. And then something extraordinary happened…
The Clovis Horizon
Surviving an ice age and migrating vast distances following large game put pressure on our ancestors which required innovation and improvement for the means of acquiring food. Sometime around that period the technology took a quantum leap which produced a sophisticated, technical and very effective edge tool requiring a high degree of skill in execution. Far different from the primitive implements before, this technology enabled rapid advancements for food, shelter, language, reasoning, creativity. Art was born from their anxieties. A paradigm shift.
Stranger still, in a very brief period of time that technology spread throughout the world (in one form or another) without the means of communication to span oceans and continents and remained supreme for thousands of years until copper was refined with fire and then bronze, iron and finally steel.
Civilization arose from the stone and the kinship with animal spirits, murdering our brethren to survive. That required a moral code, and worship was born. Now we could distinguish ourselves from the animals.
All the while, the struggle over resources continued its normal natural course. Our carnivorous ways come with a spark of killer instinct, the same tools used for food acquisition and shelter can be used to defend against enemies who might seek to do us harm.
Without these harsh realities, we would not be here, and our current reality might well depend upon the recognition of these, since we face another paradigm shift. There is a sacred reality in technology: we will never defeat entropy since the moment a thing is created it instantly begins to degrade, and yet we will never stop trying.
We’ll never know who those early adopters and innovators were among the Clovis people, but we can be certain they understood the importance, and the fire which burned in them burns in us.
Talk about this around your fires.
Here’s the thing:
To date, the best definition for the name Ai is ai, a three toed sloth. This was not the slumbering tree dweller we might think of, but a very real but long extinct member of the megafauna mammals that roamed these parts.
If you’re going to hunt it…best go well armed.
