While I don’t think that our genetic coding could have significantly changed over the last 5,000 years, I do think that our self-understanding has developed at a breakneck speed.
It's just another way of saying, as all known cultures do, we are The Real People, the rest are The Others And Not Quite Human.
In point of fact, if you were able to travel at will through time and space, and collected infants from every culture and time in not just the last 5,000 years, but probably the last 40,000 years or so, and brought them up together, you wouldn't be able to tell any difference between the finished results that wasn't due to ordinary human variation from human to human.
Contrariwise, if you shuffled the same infants at random from culture to culture and time and place to time and place, they'd grow up just like the people around them.
"Self-awareness" just means "this is the way we are, and we think we're the best that ever was."
NB: I am not arguing in favor of cultural relativity, but against any human cultural achievement being anything but learned, not in the last innate. |
