Just before the turn of the 21st century, a stone tablet providing insight into one of the world's oldest civilizations was found. The 3,000 year old artifact was named the Cascajal Block, and it provided evidence of an Olmec writing system that preceded what had already been understood to be an ancient writing system. The findings further elaborated on one of humanity's most noted inventions; the encoding of communication with written language. Certainly, not a common feat. Only the Mesoamericans and Sumeranians are known to have independently created their own fully developed written systems. This leaves these two civilizations a noteworthy distinction, one that many historians have used to place them above most other civilizations.
But why is written language held in such a particularly high regard for a civilization to begin with? What does it really say about a people, about intelligence?
The reason that most historians and anthropologists give is that written language demonstrates a people's need to experiment on establishing linguistic unity among the population. But, taking it a step further, it also shows the creativity and desire of a select few individuals to encode the observed patterns in their lives into a system that could be communicated universally. This self-awareness of an environment is where most old historians began to recognize a more basic class of civilization to another, more advanced class of civilization. It's a test that sorts out the more "intelligent" peoples from the lesser intelligent ones.
But contemporary psychologists, sociologists and philosophers alike have begun to see history from a new perspective. Studying enough archeology and history has led these investigators to abstract and generalize what it means to be intelligent. Can it truly be written language? What about mathematics, or story telling, art or musical systems?
As it turns out, written language is only among one of the few things that human beings have been noted to accomplish. We certainly have an impressive track record, always refining new technologies and coming to new understanding of the natural world around us all the time through the scientific method and sheer persistence.
However, there remains one experiment, one single experiment that encompasses all previous languages, technologies, and art.
Yes, us humans can do many impressive things, but ultimately, we aren't the best adapted at understanding how we behave, which plays a major role in our day to day lives. It is from this idea that it can be known, that one of the biggest experiments ever done is one that's started thousands of years ago, and continues to this day. That experiment is the experiment to better understand human beings ourselves.
It's the very general experiment to understand us humans.
Of course, the understanding of what we are is what changes what we look for, and where we look. It's been a long process, but slowly, through love, relationships, grief, angst, conflict, wars, invention... through the study of history, biographies, sociology and psychology, through trial and error, control and variable, we're able to better understand how humans work, and how "intelligent" life works in general. It's become more clear that the patterns that humans have developed over time are analogous to the behavior of many other animal and plant species around the world. A new period of understanding and invention is always on the horizon is coming the more we understand how humans generally work, and the more general a definition of intelligence we can define, and the more agents we can apply our definition of intelligence to.
Because the truth is, we're still learning what we are, and how we behave and act and why. That's important to keep in mind; the scientific method is not just still doing research on cosmology and the origins of life, it's still also trying to understand what our capacities to think and feel are and why we do the things we do.
So ask yourself; what is your understanding of why people think and act the way they do? And does that understanding help explain why you behave and think the way you do?
