I'm Human

I’m human, alive on this planet rock

Chip off the old block, primate, mammal stock 

Natural-born chatterbox, lookin’ back at our 

Path to the top, it started in Africa

Home of our bonobo and chimpanzee cousins

Where OG fossil hominins keep being discovered 

Seven million years is a lean budget

From knuckle-draggin’ to supreme niche-construction

But we did it, bipedalism, we leaned in 

Naturally-selected the genes in

Increased the cerebrum

Human Accelerated Regions 

And yes, I confess to some interbreeding

Bringin’ dead hominins back to life

I’m at least 3% Neanderthal, ask my wife

She knows, got the genomes to bring it home 

Plus Denisovan from a tooth and a finger bone

And that’s enough to see populations today with 

8% Denisovan sequences in their bases

Homo sapiens, the last representatives

No more Homo erectus, or floriensises

Poor little hobbits, never made it out the shire

So why did we thrive while the rest expired? 

Was it tools or babysitters or language or fire? 

Anthropogeny testify!

How does a human originate? 

I mean our form and our shape 

And also how we behave

What’s a human? Just an altered ape 

With some new adaptations

A few novel traits

And solutions

We can pass innovations

From brain to brain

We can stand up and say

I’m human…

I’m human, I can run an impala down

Marathon-style, heat stroke stall it out 

Home base, lock it down, on solid ground

Every time I range I got a new saga to talk about

He said, she said, food up in the creek bed 

Ambush, he’s dead, killer had three friends

A reputation in pieces needs redress 

Pay the blood price and hit the reset

Every thesis tries to explain it all away 

Technological ape, stoned ape, aquatic ape 

As if it all came from one small trait

Instead of generations of selection on lots of traits

Control of fire, shrunken down molar size 

Brain capacity explodes at the same time 

Social dynamic leaps, novel calories 

Gracilization leaves bones atrophied

No longer fighting for mates like wild horses

Sexually dimorphic in decreasing proportions 

Co-evolutionary culture-gene forces

On the walls of a cave, paint a portrait

Of a human and how we originate 

I mean our form and our shape 

And also how we behave

What’s a human? 

Just an altered ape 

With some new adaptations

A few novel traits

And solutions

We can pass innovations

From brain to brain 

We can stand up and say

I’m human…

I’m human, prone to teleology

Everything has a purpose, default psychology 

But Anthropogeny is a field, not a faith

So it’s got a base in biology, all you need

Is mutation and selection, blind watchmaker-style 

Evolution of the only upright ape in town

Scientific method, hypothesize, test it

And if the evidence finds different then take it down

No magic leaps allowed, just different threads

From the genes in our cells to the brain in our heads 

From the ways we get fed, to the mates in our beds

To the threats that we face, we can make it make sense

Charles Darwin said it: “Light will be thrown” 

On human origins and despite what we know 

The list of what we don’t is quite formidable 

So launch the scientific probes

Into the roots of 

Humans and how we originate

I mean our form and our shape 

And also how we behave

What’s a human? 

Just an altered ape 

With some new adaptations

A few novel traits

And solutions, we can pass 
 

Innovations from brain to brain 

We can stand up and say

I’m human