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I'm Human

from Rapsode by Baba Brinkman

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There are many things we know with confidence, and many more things we have yet to discover in detail, about how our species evolved from earlier primates ancestors.

This song celebrates the field of "Anthropogeny" aka the scientific study of human origins.

Made with support from CARTA:
carta.anthropogeny.org

lyrics

I’m human, alive on this planet rock
Chip off the old block, primate, mammal stock
Natural-born chatterbox, lookin’ back at our
Path to the top, it started in Africa

Home of our bonobo and chimpanzee cousins
Where OG fossil hominins keep being discovered
Seven million years is a lean budget
From knuckle-draggin' to supreme niche-construction

But we did it, bipedalism, we leaned in
Naturally-selected the genes in
Increased the cerebrum
Human Accelerated Regions
And yes I confess, some interbreeding

Bringin’ dead hominins back to life
I’m at least 3% Neanderthal, ask my wife
She knows, got the genomes to bring it home
Plus Denisovan from a tooth and a finger bone

And that’s enough to see populations today with
8% Denisovan sequences in their bases
Homo sapiens, the last representatives
No mo’ erectuses or floresiensises

Poor little Hobbits, never made it out the Shire
So why did we thrive while the rest expired?
Was it tools or babysitters or language or fire?
Anthropogeny testify!

How does a human originate?
I mean our form and our shape
And also how we behave

What’s a human?
Just an altered ape
With some new adaptations
A few novel traits
And solutions

We can pass innovations
From brain to brain
We can stand up and say
I’m human…

I’m human, I can run an impala down
Marathon-style, heat stroke stall it out
Home base, lock it down on solid ground
Every time I range I got a new saga to talk about

He said, she said, food up in the creek bed
Ambush, he’s dead, killer had three friends
Reputation in pieces needs redress
Pay the blood price and hit the reset

Every thesis tries to explain it all away
Technological ape, stoned ape, aquatic ape
As if it all came from one small trait
Instead of generations of selection on lots of traits

Controlling fire, shrunken-down molar size
Brain capacity explodes at the same time
Social dynamic leaps, novel calories
Gracilization leaves bones atrophied

No longer fighting for mates like wild horses
Sexually dimorphic in decreasing proportions
Co-evolutionary culture-gene forces
On the walls of a cave, paint a portrait

Of a human
And how we originate
I mean our form and our shape
And also how we behave

What’s a human?
Just an altered ape
With some new adaptations
A few novel traits
And solutions

We can pass innovations
From brain to brain
We can stand up and say
I’m human…

I’m human, prone to teleology
"Everything has a purpose" default psychology
But Anthropogeny is a field, not a faith
So it’s got a base in biology

All you need is mutation and selection
Blind watchmaker-style
Evolution of the only upright ape in town
Scientific method, hypothesize, test it
And if the evidence finds different then take it down

No magic leaps allowed, just different threads
From the genes in our cells to the brain in our heads
From the ways we get fed to the mates in our beds
To the threats that we face, we can make it make sense

Charles Darwin said it: “Light will be thrown"
On human origins and despite what we know
The list of what we don’t is quite formidable
So launch the scientific probes

Into the roots of humans
And how we originate
I mean our form and our shape
And also how we behave

What’s a human?
Just an altered ape
With some new adaptations
A few novel traits

And solutions, we can pass 

Innovations from brain to brain
We can stand up and say
I’m human

credits

from Rapsode, released May 15, 2023
Lyrics by Baba Brinkman
Produced by Tom Caruana
Additional Vocals by Isiah Dunkley
Guitar by Isiah Dunkley

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about

Baba Brinkman New York, New York

Science rapper and inventor of several novel hip-hop variants. Canadian transplant to New York. Pathological optimist.

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