How we became humans?
There is no proper answer, and I am sure that we will never be able to answer this question. Probably,
one of the most accurate explanations we can find in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” movie.
At the beginning of the film, a tribe of hominids finds a rectangular, upright positioned stone. Influenced and captivated by this monolith, anthropoids discover how to use bones as a weapon and drive their
enemies away from the waterhole.
This scene is genuinely masterpiece in a symbolically way of answering the question asked in the first sentence of this post.
In fact, we can imagine a similar scene in reality. One of the examples can be seen in “Standing Stones of Stenness,” in Scotland. Humans uprighted these monuments thousands of years ago. By raising the rocks to the upright position, humanoids became humans. By doing this, they revealed the sculptural form of the stone. Moreover, they created a commanding presence and new meaning of the
monolith. In fact, it was the act of giving sense to their world – our ancestors turned the rock into the symbol.
That made them fully human.
Follow up on that, our relationship with stone is so ancient that we have named the beginning of human history the Stone Age. Like I mentioned before, rocks were among our earliest tools and weapons, often sculpted into beautiful perfection. As Carl Gustav Jung wrote in his book “The Book of Symbols,” throughout the ages, rock has been part of human life. Heated by fire, they could be used for cooking. To better visualize how it could look like, I recommend another movie: “Quest of Fire,” directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Moreover, structures made of stone could be used for living or to bury the dead people.
Stone could signify a God and become a place of worship.
One of the most significant examples could be Ka’aba – the meteoritic black rock in Mecca, the central object of Islamic pilgrimage.
On the other hand, the mineral world is viewed as the lowest form of creation. The outside force must be
used to move or change a rock. Moreover, rocks lack feeling. Thus we accuse someone of having a heart of stone.
When we fear something, we are being frozen into stone and robbed of the ability to act.
Some people are fascinated by the deaf nature of rock which refuses us access.
One of the most famous Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, in her poem “Conversation with a Stone” writes:
I knock at the stone’s front door.
“It’s only me, let me come in.”
“I don’t have a door,” says the stone.
In conclusion, the closed world of the rocks invites our imagination to play. Compared to brief human lifespan, the foundation appears as a symbol of endurance. On the other hand, typical rock surrounds us everywhere. We give it little value. Nevertheless, the stone is one of the symbols of how we became humans.
