Human Intelligence, and the Forbidden Fruit of Caffeine

A couple of million years ago, it stopped raining in the Sahara.

At that time, the Sahara desert was green and luscious, it was the perfect environment. Apes where everywhere. As it dried up, most of the apes retreated southwards to the forest areas. But a small group of them did not make it on time, and were stuck at one of the lakes in the area.

They survived by fishing, eating from the few fruit trees around, and hunting the scarce desert animals. And by killing each other.

That was us.

We are the desert monkeys. And we grew up in an extremely harsh environment. But that was good for us - we became flexible and adaptable, and learned how to survive in the desert, in the water and in the jungle.

The Sahara would come and go, and each time it grew, our population would swell up and we’d be fat and happy. Then it would disappear every 20,000 years, and we would turn on each other and fight. But some would always survive to take the learnings to the next generation. We lost our fur, our skin got dark, we started dancing and doing rituals.

Though we were not too clever, we were still special. We could use simple tools (we had to, to survive), we lived in small settlements, and we were an apex predator. But we were still just advanced monkeys.

Till something changed somewhere - we found a forbidden fruit that gave us all the knowledge we now have.

The flip and flop of the Sahara took us the edge of intelligence. It made us generalists and flexible - we could not adapt fully to a jungle (like monkeys) and we could not adapt fully to the savannah (like Lions) and we could not fully adapt to the desert (like Camels). We had to have the ability to deal with everything. So we became quite adaptable - able to learn, because without that our lineage would have disappeared.

We could have lived there on our beachfront forever, tanning on the banks of the lake, grilling fish, singing and dancing. But we did not. Something insidious encroached.

When the Sahara became green, one of us, let’s call her Eve wandered southwards to the edge of the jungle. We don’t like the jungle. It’s dense, it’s thick, it has snakes, it has leopards, it has malaria. The jungle is not for humans.

Maybe Eve was a bit upset that day, so she went a bit further in, maybe she got lost and was desperate for anything to eat. When she saw this fruit, she was intrigued. A hard dry shell, easily opened. She broke it open, and inside was a hard, inviting, pink nut. Today we would call this the Kolanut, but she did not know what it was. She would have been wary, eating the wrong thing, particularly from the unknown jungle would have been fatal. So she tucked it away and wandered back to her village.

Maybe she kept it around, and her husband found it. He had no idea where she found it, but trusting Eve, he picked and ate it.

He was the first man to consume caffeine, at a time when the human brain had no adaptation or protection against caffeine. This would have been like Crack Cocaine to him. The wave of manic pleasure that would have overcome him! His brain racing! So much energy!

He shared it with the other villagers, and they too got into the incredible high. All their work was done in half the time, nobody slept that night. They overclocked their brains.

The next day, they had just one goal - find more of that fruit. Eve showed them the location and they brought baskets of kola back. Soon all the villages around were going on nut finding expeditions. And so started human trade.

Food satisfies. Once you eat enough, you don’t want anymore. You do not kill more animals than you need.

But that’s now how drugs work. You need more and more.

But caffeine was in the jungle. The dangerous jungle that humans were not adapted for. The place that has those noises that we still fear till today.

But they needed the caffeine - so the bravest, smartest of them started going on explorations to find more of the kolanut. Anyone who came back with a big stash could command favours from everyone else in the community - including the women. A new adaptation process started - and where before we fitted perfectly into the environment, now we became a virus - we wanted more and more. We took more risks, we rapidly started evolving into a creature that was perfectly adapted to learning how to find their drug of choice in any environment.

Our general intelligence that was there to help us survive now became pointed towards finding caffeine, and the only kids that would be born were those who were best at this.

That process took tens of thousands of years, but it honed our intelligence. Soon we could use the same abilities to find more types of food than our fish and fruit. We could create complex traps, hunt in groups and do all sorts of things.

But drug fiends are not the fittest in a society. Even though our desperate search for caffeine evolved us, at a certain point we adapted to reduce the effect of it, so it turned from a drug to a mild stimulant. We liked it, but did not need it anymore.

And anyways, we were now smart enough to fit into any environment on the continent. And we could explore and enjoyed exploring. The drug gave us curiosity, and now the curiosity had its own life.

Some of us that left the continent had no more access to caffeine. We lost it for thousands of years. But anytime a society rediscovered caffeine, it would instantly love it.

And why would we not - this drink was the base of everything we are. It gave us everything, but did it not take away everything also?

Before we ever found that nut, we had it all - we lived by the lake, played on the beach, grilled fish and danced. Now we discovered so much, built so much, but don’t we all somehow yearn to return back to that time before we discovered this devil’s fruit?

(the above is a work of fictional prose, not supposed to be scientific)