7,000 Generations Before a Single Civilisation Emerged

The latest skeletal evidence places anatomically modern humans on Earth somewhere between 180,000 and 200,000 years ago. That is approximately 7,000 generations of people biologically identical to us - with the same brains, the same cognitive capacity, and presumably the same drive to organise, build, and innovate.

And yet, by the conventional account, civilisation only appeared in the last few hundred generations. The question Randall Carlson raises is not rhetorical. It is one of the most uncomfortable in all of science. How is it that across all those long generations, nothing we would recognise as civilisation took root and flourished?

The most parsimonious answer, Randall argues, may not be that civilisation simply hadn't started yet. It may be that it had - and that what we are living in now is not the origin of human civilisation, but its reboot.