The giant

With breakneck pace we’ve reached a point where the Oriole in the forest excitedly collects plastic fibers for its nest. The average American throws away 65 pounds of clothing per year. Layers upon layers of unwanted objects sedimenting in the Earth’s crust as if it were rock salt or limestone or sulphur. Everywhere we go, everywhere we stand, anywhere we exist, we are surrounded by stuff. I wondered where all of it came from. How did we even begin to invent, create, make, produce, store, collect, curate and hoard all of it. What was one of the first objects we ever made?

The answer for me lay 2.8-million-years in the past, back to when the Hominids in Gona, Ethiopia* stood semi-naked and entirely afraid, in front of 13-feet-tall mammoths. Years and years of hunger, fear, desperation, anxiety and duress combusted into a quiet moment of cognisance. A member of the cohort picked up a stone and changed the course of culinary, military, industrial, material and essentially world history.

2.8-million and two years later, we have food and an endless stream of objects, mass produced everyday, imitated and then the imitation mass produced. We consume a million plastic bottles every minute. But now we’re running out of water and the irony is in the fact that the sea levels are rising at the same time. I thought back to the hominids and maybe what’s different for us now is that the giant we stare at today, is the stone itself — the objects around us.

An excerpt from — Rohit Sen, “the objects around us.” (2020)

Notes:
*Blumenschine, Robert & Pobiner, Briana. (2007). Zooarchaeology and the ecology of Oldowan hominin carnivory. Evolution of the Human Diet. 167-190.