the focus of my day-to-day existence shifted from convenience to survival. I went from Amazon Prime living to primal living in the Amazon. And if it wasn’t for the extraordinary joint effort of my native hosts, I could have easily ended up as someone’s dinner.

 

A tribe is a community built on a backbone of shared values, beliefs, and purpose in life. Our earliest ancestors banded together beyond the primal bonds of kinship in order to survive. These first tribes blazed a trail for the grand experiment we call society, which taught us to be human. We are now the only surviving species of Hominini — the human tribe.

 

Humans evolved from one species of primates that emerged out of Africa over three hundred thousand years ago. We weren’t the strongest animal, but we had other things going for us. We were bipedal, which gave us a vantage to scan for predator and prey, and the freedom to use our hands. We were also blessed with an unusually large brain that allowed us to fashion tools, weapons, clothing, and fire. And with the advent of cooking, the energy liberated from food digestion was diverted to our mental burners.

 

Over time, we congregated into larger clans, combining our knowledge and skills. Our survival became dependent on maintaining tight knit relationships and cooperation. It gave us a significant advantage over other animals competing for the same resources in a hostile and unpredictable environment.

 

We may have continued our short life of hunting and savagery had it not been for one game changing development: language. Other animals could communicate, but we made an astounding evolutionary leap in information processing — from grunting to articulating abstract concepts. We learned to express our thoughts. We became linguistically fluent, able to speak of love, hope, and freedom. We became storytellers, forming a collective identity by weaving together common histories about who we are and how we live. Our large neocortex, arising from either random genetic mutation or by 'intelligent design', helped to ignite this rapid evolution.

 

As living conditions improved, our consciousness expanded, and we were able to ask bigger questions, like, what does it mean to be human? As we honed our ability to think, to wonder, to understand; to reflect, to create, to be curious, and to make order out of chaos, our construct of the universe became increasingly elaborate. Suddenly, it became necessary to express ideas of our selves and our values in order to establish our purpose in the world beyond mere survival. That is the greatest gift and curse of our humanity.

 

To understand and record our world, humans expressed unique realities through philosophy, literature, art, music, myth, and religion. Every culture was an attempt to abate the same fears, and to answer the same questions. Ultimately, it mutated into dogma. So paradoxically, what was supposed to be a source of spiritual comfort and relief from a sense of aloneness in the universe often manifested as prejudice, ethnic cleansing and warfare. This new breed of tribalism was no longer driven by physical survival but rather the survival of ideologies.