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Early Evolutionary Innovations That Shaped Us

I’m going to take you back to two key evo­lu­tion­ary inno­va­tions that hap­pened ear­ly on in our lin­eage that set us off on a tra­jec­to­ry dis­tinct from that of our clos­est liv­ing rel­a­tives, the African great apes, chim­panzees, and gorillas.

ASU KEDtalks: Designing Earth’s Future

Geologists are try­ing to rec­og­nize the mag­ni­tude of this change by giv­ing our epoch a spe­cial name: the Anthropocene,” the age of humans. Some peo­ple find this depress­ing because they think that the Anthropocene is inevitably a bad thing. But it’s not. Because we aren’t bac­te­ria. Those brains that give us the abil­i­ty to har­ness ener­gy also give us the abil­i­ty to shape the way the plan­et is trans­formed. We can design our future.