The Greatest Story Ever Told

Humans: the talking hairless apes who send moving images of cats to each other through invisible waves in the air while running around a giant rock hurtling through space at an unimaginable speed around an even more giant ball of fire.

Ridiculous.

How did this happen? Who are we? Where did we come from?

Many people like to insert their own answers to these kinds of questions, answers that focus on the existential angst of what we don’t know, which often tragically misses the beauty of what we do know. People create narratives filled with superstitions and fairytales to help them cope with their impermanence and powerlessness, ignoring the marvelous, bizarre, awe-inspiring story that’s already laid out right in front of us by the universe itself. It’s a story we didn’t always know. A story that’s constantly being expanded and revised. A story that might remain forever incomplete. But it’s an amazing story. It’s our story. Perhaps the greatest story ever told.

So where did we come from? Where did our fundamental elements originate?

This unicellular life evolved nuclei and mitochondria and sexual reproduction. Then muscles and nerves and photoreceptive eye-spots. Then it became multicellular. It developed a brain and a backbone and blood and the ability to smell. Then ears and eyes and skin and the ability to taste. Then a jaw and a stomach and lungs first seen in what we call fish. Some of those fish developed proto-limbs and emerged from the water to take their first steps on land as amphibians. Then came eyelids, stronger bones, a complete rib cage, and the eventual loss of fins and gills entirely to produce four-legged reptilians with cranial nerves for sensory information.

These cold-blooded creatures then lost their scales and turned warm-blooded while growing hair, sweat and milk glands, and a four-chambered heart. They developed external genitalia, anal and urogenital openings, and no longer gave birth via eggs.

Forward-facing eyes and grasping digits saw the emergence of the first primates as claws became nails, the brain enlarged, and tails disappeared. Flexible wrists, shoulder blades, and a stiff lower spine gradually ushered these great apes to walk more upright as body hair receded.

Most notably, their brains rapidly doubled in size. It was an unparalleled evolutionary jump likely catalyzed by some combination of factors including new environmental challenges, the reality of having bigger bodies, the dawn of consuming cooked meat, and even possibly psychedelic mushrooms.

Or maybe the beings running our little simulation just got bored and decided to spice things up. Again, who knows?

In any case, our furthest relative ancestors finally emerged and took life into their own hands with the tools they constructed. As homosapiens ascended to the throne, the era of clothing, fire, and the wheel saw light.

They developed language. Farming. Cities. Currency. Religion. Time-keeping.

Wars were waged. Universities were established. Plagues were endured.

Art and philosophy began to flourish with The Renaissance. Then literature with the invention of the printing press. Then science and reason with The Enlightenment.

Then came the Industrial Revolution that brought life-savings vaccines, indoor plumbing, telephones, lightbulbs, cars, cameras, radios, airplanes, television, and nuclear weapons. Then rockets were built to travel 239,000 miles away from home and etch our steps on a neighboring space rock called a Moon. Then cellphones. And the world wide web. And the device you’re using to read this right now.