I am someone who thinks a lot. Words, for example: how were they invented? I imagine primitive days when people communicated using signs or hand gestures, before language crystallised into the elaborate systems we now take for granted. I remember seeing a French film once, La Guerre du Feu (The War for Fire), a dubbed production that fascinated me as a child. It depicted the early days of human life when fire had just been discovered, and survival depended on keeping those flames alive.

The invention of fire transformed everything. The people in that film experienced what might be called the beginning of modernisation, the start of civilisation itself. Fire provided warmth, protection, cooked food, light in darkness. It was revolutionary. Yet when I compare those primitive lives with our own, separated by hundreds of thousands of years, I find myself asking: are we really more modern? Are we truly more civilised?

I am certain many hold different opinions on this question, but I will do my best to express what makes sense to me, what logic permits me to understand. I am not imposing a position. These are simply my thoughts, arranged as clearly as I can manage. And my conclusion, perhaps unsatisfying to some, is this: humanity has not become more civilised. We have only discovered our ego, refined our communication skills, and mistaken articulation for wisdom.

The mind can now speak precisely what the brain thinks. Thoughts are well expressed, clearly communicated. We possess elaborate vocabularies, grammatical structures, rhetorical techniques. But does this constitute progress? Or have we merely formalised what was already present in those earliest gestures and grunts?

Consider those days when fire had just been invented. How did they communicate? Were hand gestures, signs, the occasional vocalisation not effective enough? If communication was truly inadequate, how did different groups coordinate attacks on one another to steal fire? They planned. They executed military-style tactics. They understood strategy, deception, timing. All without the benefit of written language or formalised speech.

This suggests something profound: we are perhaps born with communication embedded in us. Human nature allows us to understand one another through mere looks, through posture, through presence. Is this instinct, or is it logic? How are feelings felt? Can I convey love or hatred through my eyes alone, and will the other person understand what I mean without a single word being spoken?

So I return to my question: is humanity really more modern now, hundreds of thousands of years after the invention of fire? What is the difference between those early days and today? I can identify two changes with certainty. First, we have changed ourselves—our behaviours, our beliefs, our conception of what it means to be human. Second, we have changed the surface of this planet—its climate, its ecosystems, its very geology.

But have we become wiser? Have we become kinder? Have we reduced suffering or merely redistributed it? The film that captivated me as a child showed humans fighting over fire, over survival. Today we fight over oil, over territory, over ideology. The stakes have shifted. The weapons have evolved. But the fundamental dynamic remains unchanged: competition, resource scarcity, violence justified by necessity.

Perhaps what we call civilisation is simply elaboration. We have not transcended our origins; we have decorated them. We have not overcome our nature; we have constructed narratives that make our nature seem noble, or at least inevitable. Language allows us to tell ourselves stories about progress, about enlightenment, about human exceptionalism. But beneath the words, beneath the rhetoric, the same struggles persist.

Fire was revolutionary because it addressed immediate material need. It kept us warm, protected us from predators, allowed us to digest nutrients more efficiently. It was tangible, measurable, undeniably beneficial. What have we invented since that compares? We have built cities, yes, but cities that concentrate inequality. We have developed medicine, but distribute it unequally. We have created technologies that connect billions, yet isolation and loneliness remain endemic.

The people who fought over fire in that ancient world understood something we have perhaps forgotten: survival is immediate, urgent, material. They did not need elaborate philosophies to justify their actions. They needed fire, and they fought for it. We, by contrast, have constructed vast ideological systems to explain why some deserve comfort while others endure deprivation. We have formalised inequality, given it moral justification, made it seem natural rather than constructed.

This is not to romanticise the past. Life in those primitive times was brutal, short, defined by hardship. But it was also honest in its brutality. There were no euphemisms, no institutional language to obscure harm. When one group stole fire from another, it was theft. When people starved, they starved. There was no pretence that suffering served a higher purpose, no claim that deprivation built character or that inequality reflected merit.

Today we have become skilled at disguising cruelty as necessity, at framing injustice as natural law. We have language for this. We call it the market, or tradition, or simply the way things are. We have forgotten how to see what is in front of us because we have learned to see only through inherited categories. The words we use do not clarify reality; they often obscure it.

And so I keep thinking. I keep returning to that image of primitive humans communicating through gesture and gaze, understanding one another without the elaborate structures we now consider essential. I wonder if something has been lost in translation, if our capacity to articulate has come at the cost of our capacity to perceive.

The people who invented fire changed the trajectory of human history. But they did not invent cruelty, nor did they invent compassion. Those capacities were already present, waiting to be expressed. What has changed is not human nature but human scale. We can now inflict harm or provide care at distances unimaginable to our ancestors. We can ignore suffering we would once have been forced to witness. We can abstract injustice into statistics, into policy, into someone else's responsibility.

And while I try to share my silence with words, I will keep thinking. Because thinking, unlike speaking, does not require justification. It does not demand an audience. It exists as a private act of attention, a refusal to accept ready-made answers. And in that refusal, in that ongoing inquiry, perhaps something resembling wisdom can occasionally emerge.

Not certainty. Not conclusions. Just questions, held carefully, considered honestly, passed forward for others to examine in their own silence.