I am a tech executive based in San Francisco. I moved to the City in 1997, back when the center of gravity for tech was the Valley, and to be honest, I just got lucky with the timing. It has given me a bit of a front-row seat to the show for a long time, and I have been in the middle of a lot of the development and deploymet of much of the tech transforming the sciences related to human history. Like a lot of people, I have very mixed feelings about the tech world. It’s changed a lot since I started, and so I decided to take some time off to write a book about something I have always been interested in, ancient human history.

I am not a historian (historians are largely absent from the writer’s room when it comes to really ancient human history), nor am I a scientist. I am a technologist, and I have a very strong, foundational understanding of the technology being used by the fields of science related to human history (AI, data-science, advanced analytics, open-source code, etc). I originally intended to write about how this new tech has been used to help us better understand our ancient past. There are many things about the current paradigm that just never sat right with me. Simply but, a number of core assumptions of the model just didn’t seem sensible or evidence based. And in recent years, with a flood of new archeological, linguistic, genetic and geological data pouring in, on an almost daily basis, the current paradigm just seemed wrong to me in many ways. All of this begged the question: if so much of the new evidence directly contradicts many of the fundamental tenants of the current paradigm, why hasn’t it been updated in any meaningful way.

Going in, I had assumed the new tech was enhancing our understanding of human history. I many ways, the opposite is the case. The science, tightly constrained by a set of dogmatic historical and ideological assumptions, was often (but not always) obfuscating our understanding of the past.

In many key assumptions of our past we just assume are true, there are many, far more parsimonious, evidence based, and simply sensible explanations that should be considered. What really irked me was that these were mostly off the table. Why? Again, if tech played by those rules we would still be using vacuum tubes.

After nearly 30 years in tech, you get good at a few things. You need to, or you won’t survive. The first is spotting bullshit. Nearly every pitch from every kid looking to make some silly product is a ‘platform’ that will ‘change the world’. Very, very few of them are either of those things. It’s a sad fact, but in the Valley, everyone lies to everyone. It’s just how it is, so you get pretty skeptical and you learn to read between the lines.

The second thing you learn is that if you put your mind to something you care about, and work really, really hard, humans are capable of figuring out way more than we think we can. The human spirit is a very special thing, and I’ve seen a lot of people (myself included), come from nowhere, with no real credentials, and go on to do things way beyond what could be expected of them. It’s a sort of jet-fuel. When someone says it can’t be done, especially by someone like you or me, some ludicrous-mode intensity switch goes off in my head, and I won’t stop. It’s as much a bug as a feature, as personality traits go, it probably sounds better than it is. I have nearly killed myself from over work, sticking through in some terribly difficult situations where the healthy and correct thing to do would probably have been to eject. That option always exists, but I never saw it. It never entered my mind in those times. I was too busy grinding.

The third thing you learn how to do is solve big, hairy problems. There have been so many in my world and looking back, when faced with a big problem, I never once knew how to solve it at the time. I still don’t know quite how the process has worked, your faced with this huge mess, this complex landscape with an infinite number of moving parts, all interconnected so that everything you do has this chain of downstream effects and externalities you often don’t even see. But again, humans are pretty cool creatures. We just figure it out, if we believe we can. Belief is a hell of a drug.

So getting back to the book, that question irked me. Some of the data just didn’t add up. In some situations, for some very axiomatic assumptions on which the whole paradigm is based, there was virtually zero evidence to support any of it. It was a total head scratcher.

In a future posting I’ll try and explore the role our current modes of communication and interaction contribute to the problem. If you read my intro posting, a great deal of the science related to human history that has been done with this tech is terrible. In my word, we have whole operating models, and we know the limits of the tech. We also fix our bugs (when we want to, or forced to). The way science was using this tech was total armature hour stuff. If a lot of the research was done as a for-profit business, the company would fail miserably. So there’s that.

To be sure, the research I was doing was not Youtube stuff. I have read at least 1000 papers in the journals and data-sources of the highest standards in the scientific community. I still read 5-10 a day. How could it be that this stuff was getting published. Science by crayon, science by press-release.

Again, I’ll cover more of this in a future paper, but with time, I started to see what was going on, and this forced a pivot in the focus of the book. If I can ever figure out how to get it concise, the goal of the book is to provide a primer on the following:

1. Why we believe what we believe about our past, and why this needs to be reconsidered (and in many cases, competely abandoned)
2. A foundatonal overview/primer on the tech so that anyone a baseline understaind of how it works and what are it’s limits.
3. The specific problems with the tech and how it’s been mis-used in science (enough so you can call bullshit on the bullshit and make a good call on the evidence)
4. Overview the amazing accomplishments tech and science have contributed to our understanding of our past. As much as I will continue to trash a lot of the earlier, sketchy mtDNA phylogenetics, and the mess that is the current taxonomy of life, human or otherwise (the whole thing needs to go, it’s unsalvageable), ancient DNA, new dating techniques, and advances in other related fields have changed the game for us. Without this, the grumpy old keepers of the current archeological flame would still have us looking deeper and deeper in the dark. And this is just getting started. Wait until you hear about the next gen tech. We will be able to look at a trace amount of blood on an old stone axe and tell what animal was butched with it, on what day, and how the weather was when it happened. Potentially up to 10 million years ago. It’s cool stuff
5. What the data and evidence actually tells us. In other words, what do we know with a high degree or evidence-based certainty.

My hope is I can make a small contribution to the growing community contributing to all of this. In otherwords, encourage an opensource approach to human history. Nearly all of the new tech would not be possible without opensource hardware and software. Tech doesn’t give a shit about credentials (neither did most of our ancestors, btw). Now more than ever, history needs a diversity of contribution, globally..

Neitzsche said something like: “most people don’t aim low enough.”

What I think he meant by this was, aiming high is fine, but don’t lose sight of what’s right below your feet. I don’t need a geologist to tell me that the cut stones that make up the bases of the wooden pillars in the Juma Mosque in Khiva, Uzbekistan (one of the most beautiful places on earth) pre-date Islam. I saw them with my own eyes (see below). I just had to look down. That’s where the past lies, waiting to be seen, if we care to look.

Aim high, but also aim low. And contribute.

Peace!