Note: this article is more of a hypothetical story. It is a summary of a report from our in-house research team.

The first early humans appeared at the beginning of the Ice Age. The average temperature was 4-7 degrees lower than today. It was a true garden of abundance. In Northern Siberia during the Ice Age, researchers found that for every square kilometre there lived one mammoth, five bison, six horses, and ten reindeer.

Most of mankind was carnivorous. Man's distinctive feature in the animal kingdom is its ability to metabolise fat. It allowed the development of a massive brain and lasting stamina for hunting Thanks to biomagnification (concentration of nutrients up in the food chain), meat from large animals is nutritionally complete for humans.

This combination made man the apex predator. He came to rule the animal kingdom... A contemporary bear provides food for one year for a human. In the Pleistocene, elephants were three times larger than today.

At the same time, his domination coincided with the extinction of megafauna. For the first time, man discovered scarcity.

Today, man is able to extract at most 50% from his calories from proteins. In that age, it was around 10%. Man was not able to extract calories from carbohydrates. It was at that time that he developed bone marrow extraction. It is a technical and logistically complex task, which needed to correctly break bones, build a structure to boil water for hours, then collect the layer of fat on the surface. This gives a glimpse of how bad man needed fat.

Here is a testimony from Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a contemporary Arctic explorer:

The groups that depend on the blubber animals are the most fortunate in the hunting way of life, for they never suffer from fat-hunger. This trouble is worst, so far as North America is concerned, among those forest Indians who depend at times on rabbits, the leanest animal in the North, and who develop the extreme fat-hunger known as rabbit-starvation. Rabbit eaters, if they have no fat from another source—beaver, moose, fish—will develop diarrhea in about a week, with headache, lassitude and vague discomfort. If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied.

Men spent days hunting game, only to find the animal they killed was not fat enough. And so, they resumed their hunt, the stomach empty. Those too hungry gorged themselves on lean meat, to be sentenced with diarrhea, headaches, weakness, and ultimately, death.

Carbohydrates are highly detrimental to man. With the advent of agriculture, the average volume of a human skull decreased by one quarter. His height decreased too; brittle bones; narrower hips, making giving birth painful. But man had to eat the forbidden fruit. Wheat grains are a fruit.

There happened a major natural selection. Those able to survive with carbohydrates, and those who were not. But grain had actually another major side effect: it is a powerful opioid. In Hebrew, sin and wheat have the same root. The structure of human societies changed, from small thymotic hunting bands to large autocratic agricultural city-states. Archeaological research discovered wheat processing infrastructures, such as mills, from before agriculture. It was the golden age of Babylonia, Egypt, Mesopotamia... These empires were dominated by priests who came to master the agricultural production, by studying floods, astronomy, thus providing the masses with grain. It became their only food source.

Hallucinations stemming from grain deeply impacted mankind. At that time, following the bicameral hypothesis, consciousness did not exist:

Jaynes uses governmental bicameralism as a metaphor to describe a mental state in which the experiences and memories of the right hemisphere of the brain are transmitted to the left hemisphere via auditory hallucinations. The metaphor is based on the idea of lateralization of brain function although each half of a normal human brain is constantly communicating with the other through the corpus callosum.

It was common for men to hear voices they thought to be from the gods. They thought gods to live among them. Olmec heads in the jungle are an example of this. Olmecs did not think the heads to be representations of gods, but gods themselves.

A similar phenomenon remains in schizophrenics. Schizophrenia follows usually a hereditary pattern. Most of schizophrenics report a sharp improvement of their condition when they stop eating carbohydrates.

These empires drove another massive selection: namely, those who were less affected by dietary hallucinations. Indeed, they would be more able to navigate society. Progressively, gods spoke less and less. Man devolved many efforts to brings the gods back, processing grain to make it even more potent. It was at the same time that man invented bread and alcohol. They were consumed while men prayed to the gods.

But it was too late. The autocratic empires built upon mass anaesthesia were crumbling. The late bronze age collapse happened. And the gods kept quiet.

Man kept calling them... only to hear his echo.

Consciousness was born.

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