09/17/2026
Another taste of TO THE SURVIVORS:
Pinnacle Point, South Africa
In the past if you had asked me which aspects of human nature I’d take to be the main keys to our species’ survival, I’d have highlighted high-minded ideals of certain men and women from our last couple of millennia. But that’s not enough for me anymore. Now, I would also include a view further back, because of crucial clues to who we are as human beings, given how close our species came to being completely wiped out around 160,000 BC, during an ice age.
Studies of Pinnacle Point, on Africa’s southern coast, show where our forebears may have taken safe haven from the glaciers’ devastation, in caves by the shore, near dense, edible vegetation, and clam beds. Evidence showing that better weapons were invented at Pinnacle Point has led to the theory that cooperativeness and competitiveness evolved to higher levels in us together, when our ancestors learned to defend their settlement’s precious, denser food supplies, by fighting in ruthless unison, better than the scattered nomadic hunter-gatherers of the past. Our great-great-grandmothers and grandfathers bridged this difficult gap back then, surviving the crisis and expanding beyond Africa by dominating all other hominids and then decimating predators on every continent.
We now cooperate and compete at high levels in how we buy and sell and work and go at it with games and sports and wars with each other, since with our conquests of all our competitors having ended, we are left competing against each other. And we are left with a certain human mind, a mind that finds it hard to bridge the gap back and see our species’ being here at all may have always been closer to impossible than certain.
Yet the word “certain” itself bridges this gap back, given what we are saying when we say the word “certain” this certain way: “Specific but not specified.”
Bridging this gap back in our species’ history, I specify the most uncertain ones. Before those who survived in one cave or another, I especially specify those who gave up the ghost before people had names. I specify them because they saw something our species lost when we wrapped ourselves up in our comfortable claim of dominion.
After Africa, we abandoned the Unfathomable. But our ancestors survived unimaginable calamities and catastrophes, standing upright in the face of ages of ages of uncertainties, shamelessly unaided by any explanation greater than their own naked existence. They survived life on a precipice—the same precipice which we’ve been unsettled over ever since. Restless. Owing to their settlement.
I mean we may only start to settle up, once we stop calling what we have been calling awe “awe,” when we only experience convenient, known, low, doses of it, between now and the moment before we give up the ghost. I mean the moment in which each of us may see that our being here at all may have always been closer to impossible than certain. I mean at a certain uncertain point. Like Pinnacle Point. The pivotal point.
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Inspired by the July 2015 article in Scientific American, "Clues to How Homo sapiens Conquered Earth Emerge from Digs in South Africa," by Dr. Curtis Marean
