sat through a lecture on paleolithic and neolithic culture and society and all i can think abt is how from as early as there have been anatomically modern humans (and even before in some cases) there is archaelogical evidence of gender and sexual variance, caring for the elderly and disabled, a drive to make art and music, a powerful affection for animals and each other, and a desire to learn as much as possible about the world as we can and yet people will still insist these things are not human nature and therefore unnatural, that the things we consider to be essentially human in nature are very recent in the span of our history or felt by only a rare few and not something integral to our humanity and success as a collective whole.
the more we study and analyse history the more we learn what it means to be human, all the good and all the bad, the closer we come to understanding that many things people have considered to be weaknesses of character, illnesses of the person, or meaningless in the face of our mortality are functionally necessary to our humanity and cannot be erased or ignored
