Margaret Mead: first sign of civilisation

The Healed Femur

One day, a student asked anthropologist Margaret Mead what the first sign of civilisation in ancient culture was.

Expected answer: a tool. A weapon. A clay pot. Something technical.

Mead's actual answer: a healed femur.

In nature, a broken leg is a death sentence. You can't run, hunt, or escape. You die before the bone can mend. But a healed femur means something profound: someone stayed. Someone brought you to safety, fed you, protected you, waited with you until you could walk again. Someone cared.

For Mead, that moment—when one human chose to remain for another—is when civilisation truly began. Not strength. Solidarity.

That choice—to stay, to heal, to see another's pain as our own—is still the choice we face today.

The View From The Cushion

When you sit in meditation long enough, something shifts.

The boundaries we defend so fiercely—the lines between them and us, right and wrong, my tribe and yours—start to blur. The ego, with all its protective mechanisms, quiets down. What remains is clarity: the person across from you, regardless of belief, background, or origin, shares the same fundamental experience. They know fear. They know love. They know suffering.

Astronauts describe something similar. They call it the Overview Effect. From space, borders disappear. Nations vanish. You see one fragile planet, one human family, suspended in the void.

You don't need to leave the atmosphere to experience this. A meditation cushion works just as well.

The practice isn't about transcendence or escape. It's about seeing clearly. When the ego dissolves a bit, what emerges isn't sameness—it's commonality. We're wired differently, shaped by different stories, but the core circuitry is identical. We all want safety. We all want to belong. We all carry fractures.

The Current Fracture

Two days ago, Sydney experienced a devastating terrorist attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi. Sixteen people are dead, including a child and a rabbi. Thirty-eight injured. A community targeted. Fear rippling outward across the city, across the country.

The natural response is anger. Rage. The urge to separate further, to draw harder lines, to respond with force.

I understand that response. I respect it.

But here's what I keep returning to: adding anger to a situation born from anger doesn't heal the bone. It compounds the fracture.

The Buddha said it plainly, 2,500 years ago: "Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an eternal law."

This isn't about being passive. It's not about ignoring harm or refusing to protect. It's about how we respond. Do we act in ways that fracture further—or do we choose to stay, even when everything in us wants to run or strike back?

The Choice We Still Have

Civilisation didn't begin with the strongest human. It started with the one who stayed.

Right now, we're being tested on that same choice. Do we see only division—or do we see a collective broken bone that needs tending?

From space, we're one planet. From the meditation cushion, we're one shared experience of being human. From the archaeological record, we're the species that chose each other when survival logic said to abandon.

That choice is still ours.

Not to deny differences. Not to pretend harm didn't happen. Not to bypass the very real pain and fear people are experiencing right now. But to respond in a way that doesn't multiply fractures. To act from clarity, not reactivity. To ask ourselves: am I adding to the healing, or am I adding to the wound?

The Gesture That Defines Us

Margaret Mead didn't say civilisation began with weapons or walls.

She said it began with care. With someone staying when they could have left. With the deliberate choice to see another's survival as inseparable from our own.

That's still the work.

In our businesses, where we choose collaboration over competition. In our communities, where we choose curiosity over assumption. In how we respond when fear tells us to separate, when anger offers the easy path, and when the ego screams for protection.

The femur heals because someone remained.

Civilisation advances because we choose each other.

Even now.

Especially now.

Helping another overcome difficulty is the beginning of civility. Civilisation begins with helping each other.