When Did We Become Conscious?



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Written by Carys Phillips and Ellis Moloney

Art by the legendary Ettore Mazza:

Fact checking by Lucy Timbrell and Amanda Rossillo

Narration by David Kelly

Editing by Marta Mancusi and Andrew Dixon

Title editing by Manuel Rubio

Produced by David Kelly and Andrew Dixon

Huge thanks to Bone Clones for their fantastic skull replicas. Check them out at

Music from Silver Maple, Epidemic Sound and Artlist.
Stock footage from Storyblocks, Artgrid and Shutterstock.

00:00 Introduction
04:54 More Than Instinct
16:22 The First Mind
29:11 Are We Special?
44:39 We Were Not Alone

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Author: History of Humankind

32 thoughts on “When Did We Become Conscious?

  1. 24:10 Yo creo que todas esas rocas fueron intentos fallidos (más o menos) de armas para poder cazar, o fueron hechas mientras viajaban. Buscaban probablemente formar armas eficientes, y creo que mediante ese proceso se lograban muchas formas interesantes.

  2. I feel that the ivory lion man was a symbol of what they were. They were not lion – they were man – and yet they had the kindest of a lion. They were the greatest hunters of the land. With the very ivory of the tusk as proof.

  3. i would love to be able to know some of the games our early ancestors might have had, imagine a super super old game that we never thought about and it turns out to be super fun

  4. I hope no one here believes we have reached some consciousness plateau? Imagine what degree of consciousness might await us if we are lucky enough to live and become ?? Hyper-conscious? I dont believe that an appreciation of aesthetics or even an ability to judge the mood of a passing pachyderm makes us conscious. Any more than I believe the lack of a nervous system precludes consciousness…. And it seems absolutely obvious that true absolute consciousness is still not ours… We may not even be close considering that we are in fact still slaves to our physiology, though we do math and love music and other art forms and we appreciate and understand what it might mean to be a higher level being we fall far short of that realization in our daily lives…

  5. "The first idea". I guarantee you it wasn't a primate. I have birds. Parrots. I've been around parrots all my 56 years. Some are content to live out their days doing bird things. Others need near constant mental stimulation. The mischievous ones make their own entertainment by setting traps and playing tricks on the other birds, or the nearest human. Some of their antics require quite a bit of planning and understanding. They also have to be thinking outside of linear time to be successful in their plans. A sort of "if this, then that" but in more than one simple step. The greatest example of this I ever heard of was a bored male African Gray, whose mate was expecting chicks. She had already laid her eggs, and was much more interested in them than her male counterpart. This was in an environment where there were other parrot species present and interactions were common. Several egg clutches were being incubated at the same time across the avairy. After several weeks, the eggs began to hatch. Somehow, a baby Senegal Parrot emerged from one of the eggs in the Gray's nest, and a Gray was hatched by the Senegals. The male Gray basically laughed for three days. At some point he had switched the eggs without anyone noticing.

  6. The issue of consciousness is not a biological product but a cultural one. Culture is almost exclusively human; animals have only minimal cultural evolution. Humans diverged from animals when, for the first time, they subjected nature to their will—whereas all other organisms remain subject to nature. This leap occurred with the first stone tool that humans used as a knife, some three million years ago. There may have been other tools that left no traces. From that point, an entirely new human history began.

  7. That "Lion Man" carving is actually pretty excellent, Especially for the "oldest piece of art ever." Even though that cannot possibly be true, for something so relatively early the unmistakable image of it is vividly in my imagination.

    (…Then again back in Boy Scouts I failed in my lame attempt at my "wood carving" merit badge… 😉)

  8. OMG Thomas Nagel’s What is it like be a bat, has haunted my dreams for the past 10 years. Still have nightmares about philosophy paper about the article 😂😂😂😂

  9. Consciousness is a nessesarity for life otherwise it get extinct. It's connected to life very early in existance. We differ because we think and can explain and learn eachother things. Other species need to observe, recognize and imitate. But what happend that we can think and have collective consciousness. Cave paintings gave us proof that we see the same an important step to explain our consciousness

  10. you cant just say something is true because you cant think of a counterpoint "i dont know why a bee would do that for survival therefore its doing it for fun" whos to say the bee didnt just interpret the ball as a flower and react on instinct

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