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skin a mammoth or to fashion another tool.
    Fast-forward 1.5 million plus years. Somewhere around one hundred thousand years ago, our cousins, Homo neanderthalensis, started practicing burial rituals.They dedicated a special site for the burial and seemed to carefully position the bodies. In some cases, they adorned the dead or prepared them for future battles by placing antlers or other objects, such as panther paws, in the graves. According to some archeologists, an offering of flowers was placed next to some of the corpses.These practices are an early sign that a bipedal primate thought about a future that went beyond life on earth. Future thinking transcended the earthly body, and this vision of an afterlife became a foundational belief for many of the religions that guide our behavior today.
    About thirty-five thousand years ago, Neanderthals began to die out and a new animal appeared on the scene, Homo sapiens. With big brains characterized by frontal lobes that had grown sixfold in a short evolutionary span, knowing man developed imagination, the ability to symbolically represent thoughts and experiences. Later, he was able to link imagination with an increasingly refined sense of time. Eventually, we Homo sapiens labeled natural phenomena with minutes, hours, days, weeks, years,and decades. This combination of imagination and time sensitivity gives all humans the power of mental time travel, the capacity to think of ourselves experiencing any and all instants of the past and future.
    Imagination and time sensitivity also gave us a unique evolutionary advantage, setting us apart from all other animals.According to psychology’s Bischof-Köhler hypothesis, only humans can put the needs and demands of the present aside, anticipate future needs, and take action to secure them. Our hominid ancestors looked ahead and crafted new, improved, long-lasting tools. Today we stock the freezer during a sale, accrue vacation days to spend all at once, and set aside money for college and retirement. So whenever someone poses the question “What’s unique about humans?” feel free to skip the traditional answers about opposable thumbs, tool use, and language, and instead answer, “Hope.”
The Power of Stories
    In December 1994, during a hike in the hills of southern France, Jean-Marie Chauvet noticed a draft of air coming from a cleft in the rocks. He recruited two friends and, with their help, moved heavy rock and opened a small tunnel that led into a series of chambers. With their flashlights, they saw what is now believed to be one of the first cave drawings ever made, a red ochre mammoth painted on a rock hanging from the ceiling. Subsequent trips into the caves revealed more art depicting horses galloping, rhinos battling, and hundreds of other paintings and engravings.
    The thirty-thousand-year-oldart in Chauvet Cave is now preserved by the French Ministry of Culture. The walls of the cave “talk” to us through humanity’s oldest known drawings. All but one of the images is of animals. The exception is a Venus-like human figure, a woman swollen with fertility. On the floor are bones of all types. In one part of the cave, a cave bear skull is placed precisely in the center of a large stone, possibly serving as an altar for rituals. These scenes were created by storytellers documenting their lives and possibly their futures.
    Like our French cave-painting ancestors, modern-day humans are compelled to tell stories. With the help of our complex language, we have gotten quite good at it. I learned the art of storytelling growing up in south Louisiana, where Cajun stories are a social currency and people get richer by the day. Most of the stories that my parents and their friends told at crawfish boils and family barbecues were about the good old days. Yet the stories that may be even more captivating are the ones we have only imagined.
    You don’t need to be a novelist or screenwriter to craft fantastic tales. We all seem