Near the end of the Pleistocene, roughly 14,000 years ago, conditions increasingly allowed this accumulation of knowledge, skills, behaviors, and technologies to accelerate. What emerged was something no single person could have created alone: a collective body of knowledge that could support increasingly complex human societies.
This suggests another way of thinking about human destiny.
Our destiny does not have to be something predetermined or created by exceptional individuals. It can be something we make together — and that “we” can be understood more broadly than humanity alone.
When people create relationships based on cooperation, reciprocity, learning, care, and responsibility, they create conditions in which prosocial behavior can grow. Extending those values to our relationships with nonhuman life suggests an even larger form of reciprocity: recognizing that human flourishing depends upon the flourishing of the living systems around us.
In this sense, becoming a People is more than simply learning how to live together. It means learning how to live together within a community of life. A People can therefore create possibilities that no individual could create alone—and a living community can create possibilities that people could never create by itself.
What one generation learns about caring for people, land, water, plants, animals, and other living systems can become the starting point for the next generation.
That continuing process—people shaping culture, culture shaping people, humans influencing ecosystems, and the living world shaping us in return—makes a destiny.
