Did Ancient Humans Dream About the Future?

Close your eyes for a moment and think about something you are afraid of losing. Not something you have already lost. Something you still have. Now notice what just happened in your mind. You just traveled forward in time. You imagined a future that has not happened yet and felt something about it. When did that ability begin. Not for you. For the species. In this video we trace the archaeological evidence for when ancient humans first developed the capacity for future-directed thinking — from the single-step Oldowan tools of 2.5 million years ago, to the seventy-step Acheulean hand axes of 300,000 years ago that required imagining a finished object before a single strike was made, to the ochre processing workshops at Blombos Cave dating to 100,000 years ago where pigment was prepared for ceremonies that had not yet arrived, to the deliberate food storage evidence going back 400,000 years. Then we explore what this means for dreams. The brain structures responsible for dreaming — the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, the default mode network — are the same structures responsible for mental time travel. Ancient human brains were anatomically identical to ours. Which means they dreamed. And some of what they dreamed about had not happened yet. We will never know what they imagined lying in the dark in prehistoric Africa. But the evidence of what they built suggests it was worth getting up the next morning and working toward. #AncientHumans #Psychology #HumanEvolution #Prehistoric #Science #DidYouKnow #Brain #Neuroscience #Dreams #Anthropology This video is for educational purposes only.