Over the last ten thousand years, virtually every aspect of
human culture has changed. The food we eat, the homes and
shelters we live in, the clothes we wear, our language, music,
stories, science, technology, social organization have all
changed in fundamental ways that make modern cultures
unrecognizably different from hunter-gatherer cultures. One
aspect of human culture has remained unchanged over the last ten
thousand years – all humans have retained a basic ability to
recognize and interpret footprints on a beach. When you look at
footprints on a beach, what you see and the way you interpret
them is essentially exactly what a hunter-gatherer would have
seen and interpreted a hundred thousand years ago. We still use
the same reasoning to understand what we are looking at. The
hunter-gatherer may have been a more sophisticated tracker, but
looking at human footprints on a beach may be one of the few
aspects, perhaps the only aspect, of human culture that links us
with hunter-gatherer cultures more than a