Humanity's Greatest Invention

The Motorcycle Diaries (Part 5)

Dear Subscribers,

I have a question that I’d like to ask you.

The question is this: What is humanity’s greatest invention?

Take a minute to think about it. While you do, I’ll continue with my story.

The next day we get up early, drink some coffee and head up to the ranch to prepare the milpa for burning. The Mayan people still practice the ancient technique of slash-and-burn agriculture, which involves cutting down a swath of jungle, letting the wood and foliage dry up in the sun, and then burning it before planting. It seems that the ash from the fire makes the soil rich for the corn.

I was stoked to get out there working. There’s no form of exercise I like better than slashing through the jungle with a machete. I was still feeling dejected, so I wanted an outlet for my energy. Exercise is my therapy.

What’s more, we were going out there with bottles of Hilda’s pozol, my favourite drink in the world. Pozol is a corn beverage that is a staple of campesino life in Chiapas. Normally labourers don’t pack a lunch, but head to work with a two litre bottle of pozol, which they drink over the course of the work day. Pozol is found across Chiapas, but I’ve never found any pozol that compares to Hilda’s. Hers is slightly fermented, which I believe makes the nutrients easier for the body to absorb, sending power to every part of your body, enabling you to work tirelessly in the jungle heat.

As we work, I tell Eli about my trip to Tonina.

After hearing me out, he responds: “Yeah, one thing I’ve been trying to figure out for a long time is what the deal with the Ancient Aztecs and Mayans were. Were they really as bad as they were made out to be, or was that just Spanish propaganda to justify the Conquista? You gotta remember, history is written by the winners. So, I know it does seem like there’s tons of evidence of human sacrifice, but when I came here I was drawn by the energy, and that energy never felt bad to me, man. It felt clean and pure and good, and I think that’s what a lot of other people feel too. So were they really practicing human sacrifice and drinking blood and all this crazy shit? Or was that just some shit the Spaniards made up later to make people accept their rule? So part of me thinks that it was all bullshit, but then again, Tonina’s weird. It’s a different vibe over there. Over there, you do get the feeling that they were maybe more evil, you know? Who knows? Maybe they got more evil over time.”

His thoughts echoed my own. There was an energy around Palenque that was special. People have been coming from all around the world to do mushrooms here for decades. There is a tranquil serenity in crystalline pools under roaring waterfalls that soothes the spirit and inspires the mind. It’s magical. There’s a reason that eople come from all around the world to these ancient sites. They’re drawn by this mysterious, magical force, and when they come, they feel the presence of something special that they can’t understand, and become entranced by a sense of wonder at the mysteries hidden by time.

Were people really hanging out at all these beautiful waterfalls in the morning and then going to a ceremony where a captive gets his heart ripped out of his chest in the afternoon?

I guess anything is possible, but it’s hard for me to believe.

Okay. Time’s up.

What is humanity’s greatest invention?

I’m curious as to what people chose, so please take a moment to share your answers in the comments below.

I’m guessing that most of you chose a vehicle, a drug, a means of generating power, or maybe a technology used for communication.

I’m guessing not too many of you picked corn. You might not even realize that corn is an invention. But it is, and I want to make the case that it is humanity’s greatest invention.

First, it is one of the most widely cultivated crops in the world, with over a billion tons grown annually. It’s used for food, for fuel, and for animal feed. If corn disappeared, millions would starve. We depend upon it for our survival.

Second, it’s a marvel of genetic engineering that has not been surpassed in ten thousand years. If you are unaware of the history of maize, I encourage you to watch this video, which will bring you up to speed on how miraculous the domestication of Zea Mays was.

You might have heard people say that corn is like a religion in Mexico. It’s true. There’s an expression here: “Sin Maiz, No hay Pais”, which means “Without corn, there’s no country.”

It was Eli who taught me about corn, really, about how miraculous this plant is, and it would be difficult to overstate how important it was for both the ancients and the Maya of today.

The Popul Vuh, which recounts the Mayan creation story, says that the Gods fashioned the first men from corn dough. All Mesoamerican civilizations had their own version of a Maize deity. Think about that. For thousands of years, maize was worshipped as a god by millions of people across a vast area. In ancient times, Mayan nobles would even bind the heads of their children so their heads would be shaped more like a cob of corn. Think about that. Corn was so revered that its shape was exalted as the standard of beauty to be aspired to.

I think that revering corn makes a lot more sense than a lot of other religious practices. Mesoamericans have relied on maize for their survival for thousands of years. Basically, corn is a super-food, containing all the essential amino acids necessary for human nutrition. However, in order for the human body to process these amino acids, they must be cooked with a certain chemical agent in a process called nixtamalization. If you see undigested corn in your shit, that means that it wasn’t prepared properly, and your body couldn’t make use of its nutrients. That doesn’t happen in Mexico. The ancients used ash and ground-up shells for this purpose, but today people use crushed lime stone. Somehow ancient people were aware of this chemistry, which allowed their system of agriculture to provide for large populations. Maize made Mesoamerican civilization possible.

However, maize only came into being as a result of sophisticated genetic engineering which presumably could have come about only as the result of an advanced society.

And therein lies a mystery, perhaps a greater mystery than that of the pyramids.

Without maize, Mesoamerican civilization couldn’t arise. And if no civilization existed, who created maize?

This is one of the many reasons that many theorists have proposed the existence of an advanced civilization earlier than that of the Maya, earlier even than the Olmecs. I’m not dismissive of such theories, but there’s another possible explanation: it was the achievement of a shamanic society rather than a civilization.

Let me explain what I mean by that. By shamanic, I mean unconquered indigenous people who do not practice statecraft. An advanced society and a civilization are not synonymous terms. The term civilization refers to a specific power structure where city-states rule surrounding territory and extract resources for the benefit of an urban ruling class.

But the development of maize gives us a clue as to how another advanced society might have focused their energy. Perhaps the focus of their science was based on the observation and manipulation of plants and natural processes. Maybe they created an advanced science which arose from a different relationship with nature than that of Western civilization. Maybe, rather than seek to dominate nature, ancient knowledge-keepers worked with nature, using their intelligence to guide the evolution of different plant species to suit their purposes.

Can you imagine what such a society could accomplish over the course of thousands of years? Surely, the knowledge of such a society would surpass our own in certain ways. Does not the existence of maize stand as proof that such a society existed?

Corn is far from the only crop developed by ancient Mesoamericans. A full list would include pumpkins, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, cacao, peanuts, pears, peppers, pineapples, kidney beans, and cocaine, among many others.

So were these crops consciously developed by Mesoamerican scientists, or was it the result of thousands of years of co-evolution between homo sapiens and these species?

I don’t claim to know, but the idea that humanity’s greatest invention might have been achieved by a shamanic society is fascinating to me. If it is true, it reveals the absurdity of the Myth of Progress, which rulers have long used as a justification for reshaping societies to suit their interests.

After work we go back and relax at the house. Later, I decide I want to explore, so I head up to Misol-Ha, the closest waterfall. There are incredibly beautiful waterfalls all over Palenque, and with a motorcycle there’s easy to get to. I don’t remember ever visiting Misol-Ha before, even though it’s ten minutes away from Eli’s place, where I’ve spent a lot of time over the years.

Anyway, I roll up, pay the entry and start down a wooden boardwalk, which leads to stairs down to a picture-perfect pool of turquoise water, where the water falls evenly down from a cliff-side several stories high. Truly breathtaking. I dove in and swam around, delighting in the beauty of the universe, my mind calm, and clear, and accepting. Come what may, life is good, and I have a lot to be thankful for.

After swimming, I made myself comfortable and started reading the Cthlulu Mythos by H.P. Lovecraft. It was a bilingual book where one story was written side by side in English and Spanish. One page was in one language and the opposite was in the other. I got absorbed into the story of a meteorite that brought some unspeakable evil to Earth. It was set in a dreary, God-forsaken puritan town in New England, and it is full of sinister references to the forces of nature, as if nature were hostile to human life.

Lovecraft was a master at evoking the mother of all fears - the fear of the unknown. In this tale the meteorite turned a forest evil, to evoke that feeling seemed almost to be nature itself. It recalled to me the old characterization of nature as “a war of all against all”. It made me ponder what life was like for people who think in that way. To me, nature is this marvelously mysterious and intricate expression of the life-force of the universe - the most beautiful and wonderful thing imaginable. But people like Thomas Hobbes saw nature as a savage adversary, “red in tooth and claw”, ready to swallow up its prey in its awful maw. Does this fear of nature lie at the root of the problem? Do you people want to dominate and to control nature because they view it as their enemy?

It was a very strange feeling to be in this paradisaical place engrossed in such a tale. Somehow, reading about a hellish place made me appreciate the beauty around me more. I have the feeling that neither Hobbes nor Lovecraft were chilling by a beautiful jungle waterfall when they wrote their books.

Truly, heaven and hell are on this Earth.