Over the past 18 months, I’ve immersed myself deeper and deeper in the Paleolithic, reading scores of books and journal articles. Why?

Ever since my first visit at about age four to the Historical Museum of Hokkaido, with its mammoth skeletons and Paleolithic dioramas, I’ve been fascinating by the archaeology of deep human history (as Clive Gamble puts it in the subtitle of his exceptional book Settling the Earth). I wandered by chance onto the Tategahana Paleolithic Site at Lake Nojiri in Nagano during an excavation, walked carrot fields in Yokohama looking for Jomon potsherds, and when I traveled to Jordan during college for an Iron Age dig, I spent my evenings surface-collecting Middle Paleolithic tools from a nearby barley field. The vast, mostly unknown and seemingly unrelatable world of the Stone Age seems so much more interesting than the thoroughly modern world of Archimedes, Hadrian, and Augustine of Hippo.

The people driving their cars around the Coliseum in the photo below are separated from the Romans who built it by a mere 1% of the time our species has walked this earth. The archaeology of the complex, stratified societies that emerged during and after the Neolithic frankly bores me.

I’ve always been that strange arty type just as entranced by science and technology — there is no dichotomy or conflict for me. I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life melding my background in language and communication with a passion for data-driven research and the creation of new technologies. Despite being an English major during college back in the mid 90’s, my first “real” technology job was running the websites for several university departments, using vi on Sun Solaris to hand code the sites’ HTML — a skill carried over from repeatedly hitting F11 to Reveal Codes in WordPerfect on DOS.

When I finally took calculus alongside aspiring engineers and physicists, I had an epiphany: Mathematics and programming languages follow the same rules as music and human languages — a vocabulary with syntax and return values. Poetry is code. Music is math. And they’re not mere logic — they’re beautiful, emotionally rich expressions of this amazing, symbolic, social brain we’ve inherited from our ancestors.

When friends and colleagues wonder at my diverse interests — writing poetry, playing with LEGO, reading as much as I can about the Paleolithic, and running the planning and design teams for software development companies — I explain that there is a common thread throughout. I observe patterns and I make connections. I imagine and I explore. In doing so I create. I make stuff. I build things.

But I’m not special — to do all that merely defines me as a member of the human species. Understanding how we became us — and what “us” even means — is precisely what we can learn by studying human origins and the vast reaches of the Paleolithic. That is why I read.