memes

I once tried and failed to start a discussion with some colleagues about how insane it actually is that humans invented bread and they all looked at me like I was an idiot. But honestly, if you have no frame of reference, you have lived as a hunter gatherer and then suddenly one day you find a way through trial and error to come up with the concept of bread. Like how??? You just look at the withered grass and go: I bet I can eat that.

You eat the seeds for awhile and then you play around with a rock and start smashing the seeds, only after you have understood that they must be completely dry and tasteless. And you create flour. Maybe you use it for face paint or dry and eat it and it kinda sucks and maybe you start thinking "aye, when I eat it, it turns into clay sort of. I bet I can do something with it. Maybe you try using it for glue or painting the cave walls. Maybe it doesn’t really work like you want it to and then one day, because you have fire, you just try and see what happens when you throw the flour clay on the fire. Maybe several steps have come before this and the experiment is more calculated. Maybe it all happened by pure coincidence. But suddenly you have made the clay hard and inside it is either soft or it is flakey. Kinda tastes good. The burnt edges from the fire taste nice. The consistency of the bread is new and interesting. And from there, it is iteration upon iteration, learning to make bread.

I don’t know anything, I just think so many aspects of the crossover from hunter gatherer to the humans be are today is so incredibly interesting and weird. The most mundane things we take for granted now, are kind of amazing inventions that I find wild to think about. I dunno. I just think human creativity is cool and weird.