"Where Do We Come From?" book

“Where do we come from?”

A book cover design aimed at gifted adolescents and young adults.

“Coming of Age on Planet Earth, Book 1: Where Do We Come From?”.

18” x 24”. Acrylic ink, Photoshop. 2023.

ABSTRACT

“When human beings first evolved the ability to be self-aware, they used it to plan only a few hours or days ahead…Today, however, people spend much of their time thinking about things that may happen months or years from now. As a result, many people are plagued with excessive worry about the future, worry that serves no useful purpose to them.”
-Mark Leary, “The Curse of the Self”

THE SHORT OF IT

I envisioned a fictional trilogy of books titled “Coming of Age on Planet Earth”. The first book in the series, titled “Where do we come from?”, would cover human history between 70, 000 years B.C.E and 1400 A.D. The book’s main audience would be composed of thoughtful adolescents and young adults who are likely to be interested in topics covered within the book series: history, art, philosophy, and science.

The book is not meant as an encyclopedia of these topics but is more an exploration of the origins of the current human condition. Science, history, and biology books by publisher DK (Dorling Kindersley) are an important reference for the nature, presentation, and overall feel of the book. Its tone would be nuanced: warm and life-affirming at the innovations and accomplishments of the human race, but also pensive, reflective, and gently melancholy in its exploration of more mature human realities such as warfare, social and political division, and misunderstanding.

THE LONG OF IT

The year 70, 000 B.C.E is used because it’s often delineated by scientists and anthropologists as a kind of “dawn of consciousness” for the human race. The year 1400 is a rough date for the beginning of the Renaissance. The middle book of the trilogy would be titled “Who are we?” and would cover history between the beginning of the Renaissance in 1400 to the end of World War II in 1945. The final book, titled “Where are we going?”, covers human history between 1945 to the present day.

The cover for “Where do we come from?” was meant to capture the complexity of life on earth. All sorts of earthly paraphernalia from all time periods would be jumbled together to form the Earth.

Research

This project began, as many of my ideas do, with a fascination with science, history, and psychology.

I often think our ability to empathize with one another is one of the noblest capacities human beings have. Where does empathy come from? How did our brains develop to be able to “feel into” what others experience?

It’s strange to consider, after reading into neuroscience and neurobiology, that the same parts of human brains that facilitate compassion are also where we draw lines on who we consider human, worthy of respect and dignity, and whom we deem to be outsiders and “others”. It’s this bizarre interplay between our highest and basest selves that has defined our entire history: our relationship to warfare, weaponry, technology, and innovation, to the environment, to each other.

It’s a kind of rollercoaster of character for human beings. Are we good? Are we bad? What is our nature? The difficult thing is that the answer is that we are both of these contradictory things at the same time. Being human is being a walking, living, breathing contradiction.

Although hominids (gorillas, chimpanzees, monkeys, other simians) have existed on earth for millions of years, and the earliest human bones have been dated to about two million years ago in Central Africa, modern homo sapiens are not thought to have arrived until between 160, 000 and 70, 000 years ago.

Why this period specifically? It’s at this time that the first evidence of modern tool- and trap-making can be dated to. The invention of this kind of technology points to a kind of 'cognitive modernity’ that was not present before in human beings. It seems, for whatever myriad of reasons, that humans gained a heightened capacity to imagine, think of, and plan for the future. They could imagine trapping animals for food, rather than the hunter-gatherer mode that had existed prior, and could plan farther into the future.

In the modern day, with all our modern problems, we no longer hunt for animals in the savannah. Now we plan for retirement, hope to save up for our children’s college funds, worry about nuclear war, climate change, and socioeconomic inequalities, and wonder whether our lives dominated by capitalism, consumerism, and material comfort have any intrinsic purpose or meaning. Despite our radically different circumstances, our brains are built in much the same ways that they were 70, 000 years ago.

Could this be the source of our troubles and anxieties nowadays?

PROCESS

Initial Sketch

The concept of building the shape of the earth from myriads of things from culture, history, and the planet’s ecosystems was present from the initial sketch. The view of the earth for this first book’s cover would center on Africa as the origin point of the human race. Following book covers in the series would center on other continents.
Earth Prototype

Early in the design process a more painterly approach to the image was considered instead of the final look, which was much more crisp, graphic, and vector-esque. This was ruled out to eliminate any more visual complexity on top of the already congested piles of things that would cover the planet’s surface.

ALL VERSIONS + ALTERNATES

Getting the correct colors and value hierarchy for this book cover was very tricky. It was jam-packed full of visual information, but I knew the most important information, the book title and authors and publisher, would need to be clear and easy to read. As a result, there were a number of other attempts at color palettes to experiment with what would have the greatest readability.

APPLICATIONS

Ultimately, my goal is to illustrate much more than just the front cover for “Where do we come from?” I aim to illustrate all sections of all three books of this trilogy: interior illustrations, table of contents, back cover, spine, all sections. It’s my dream that I can publish this book series some day, which is one I would have loved to pick up myself when I was 13 or 14 years old.