My inner caveman

When people ask me if I like sushi, I tell them a little story about my great, great, great...great, grandfather, Grog, who was a caveman. As the story goes, Grog was there when they discovered fire and its many uses. When asked what it meant to him, by a reporter for The Daily Hunt, Grog said, "No more raw fish!"

I named the blog after him, and I often try to see the world through his eyes. Much as we like to think that we're modern men, and women, the fact is that we're not too far removed from our cave dwelling ancestors.

We really aren't evolving much, in a good way, anymore either. In many ways, modern man, and women, are actually devolving. For example, think about how modern optics are making your natural vision immaterial from a survival standpoint. With a set of contact lenses, or laser correction, you can still find a suitable mate and pass on your defective genes to another generation, and another, and another, etc. Only a couple hundred years ago, you would have been viewed as less than ideal mate material, practically blind.

We've tamed a lot of science in recent decades so we're feeling pretty smug about our "evolution", but under the skin, and particularly in our heads we haven't come very far at all. Much of our instinctive behavior is still quite primitive. Men are still natural hunters. Women are still naturally nurturing mothers. Our intellects may be improving, but our natural responses to so many situations are based on those two perspectives.

Think about our mating habits, and I hope to talk about this more someday, and you'll see how it all works. There's a really good and amusing book on the subject called Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps: How We're Different and What to Do About It by Allan Pease and Barbara Pease. Get it. Read it. Give it to your kids to read. Another very recent book I just read is The Female Brain by Louann Md Brizendine. Both are fascinating revelations on what really controls our psychologies.

If you stop and evaluate situations from the point of view of your inner caveman (yeah, yeah and your inner cavewoman too), you will begin to see with a lot more clarity. We are not in control of our instincts. It was only about 6000 years ago that the Iron Age began. 6000 years! I can remember nearly 1% of that amount of time, so it really isn't that long ago, and I'm not all that old.

What I like to entertain my imagination with sometimes is considering the circumstance where one caveman, by some freak of nature, had a higher IQ than the rest. Maybe his IQ was no more than 60 or 70 by today's standards, but that might have been the equivalent of 150 today.

Now is this caveman content to stalk a wooly mammoth or collect berries, or is he or she more inclined to sit in the cave and figure out how to make a better knife? Or how to make a broom? Or a pacifier? Think of some of the basic tools of life and when and how they might have come about and you'll see how I view the world.

We know who invented such recent marvels as the radio (Marconi), the lightbulb (Edison) and who invented the toilet (Crapper), but do we know who invented the spear, the fishing hook or the anvil? Whoever he or she was, I'd like to acknowledge their (relative) genius. I'd build a monument to you but I don't know your name. So I built a blog.

Thanks, anyway.
Grog CD (the 400th)