A Human Perspective

Addressing a scale of time that reaches beyond the scope of recorded history allows us to illustrate a story in which human kind does not play the role of protagonist. However, even 50,000 years ago, homo sapiens was firmly on the stage. The great migrations, in which mankind saw the world for the very first time, were well underway.

Culture, art and language developed during this period in human history have survived, in varying degrees, to the present. Cave paintings of hunting scenes and statuettes carved in mammoth ivory tell of mankind’s earliest brushes with artistic inspiration. Siberian nomadic tribes still use bones and tusks of the mammoth to craft ingenious, durable tools. Such examples are living links to a time that offers little else in terms of direct clues to humans’ interactions with the environment.

In a more general sense, considering the brevity of human history in comparison to natural history is awe-inspiring and, perhaps not altogether strangely, a source of solidarity that sits at the very core of the mammuthus philosophy. In constructing collaborative frameworks to sharing knowledge and respecting the heritage that we hope to pass on to future generations, we often draw inspiration from the historical reminder of exactly how small and close the human family is.