The Button Is Still in a Human Hand

Hamed Vahdatinasab on Six Million Years of Creativity, and the First Threshold We Cannot See Past — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode 86

Right now, the button that could start a nuclear war sits in a human hand. Hamed Vahdatinasab is not making a moral claim about that fact — good or bad isn’t the point. The point is that this is about to change for the first time in the history of our species: the decision is moving out of human hands and into the algorithm of a machine. And because it has never happened before, we have no historical precedent to lean on. We are anxious, he says, because there is no ancestor who faced this and left us a lesson.

That image opens and closes this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri — a long, wide-ranging conversation with one of Iran’s leading voices in prehistoric anthropology, archaeology, and human evolution. Across nearly four billion years of life on Earth and six million years of human ancestry, Hamed traces a single thread: how creativity itself was born, refined, and passed down — and what happens to that thread now that something faster than us has entered the chain.

Creativity Did Not Begin With Us

Hamed opens with a reframing that runs through the entire conversation: humans did not invent creativity. Living organisms possessed it long before a species called human ever existed, and it was precisely because that capacity already existed in the lineage that something like us became possible at all. Wolves show creativity in hunting strategy. Leopards in ambush. Hyenas, wild dogs, and social animals generally show it in degrees. Creativity, he insists, is not binary — it is a spectrum, a tool for solving problems in more than one way.

What makes humans different isn’t that we have creativity and other animals don’t. It’s that we have the most complex variety of problem-solving ability of any species — because we have the most complex brain among all mammals. And that, he traces back to a specific evolutionary inheritance: grasping hands combined with a large brain, present in early primates long before any human ancestor existed.

Why It Wasn’t the Dolphins

A question Hamed says he’s asked often: dolphins are intelligent, communicative, even self-aware by some measures. Why didn’t this kind of creativity evolve in them instead of us?

His answer is structural. The foundational biological material has to exist before mutations can build on it — and that material, in primates, included the combination of a relatively large brain and four-fingered, prehensile hands capable of holding and manipulating objects. Without that base material, no amount of intelligence alone produces the trajectory that leads toward tool use, technology, and eventually something we’d call civilization.

The Stone That Started Archaeology

One of the episode’s most vivid passages traces the moment creativity first becomes visible in the archaeological record. Before genus Homo existed, the australopithecines — small, vulnerable hominins barely a meter tall, more often prey than predator — faced a specific problem: how to access the protein-rich marrow inside animal bones left behind after lions or hyenas had already eaten and moved on.

The solution, Hamed explains, was to take one stone, strike it against another, and produce a sharp edge — an edge that could crack open a skull or a long bone and reach the protein inside that no other scavenger could access. This act, dated to roughly three and a half million years ago, is, by his account, formally the beginning of archaeology as a discipline: the first moment we find physical evidence of culture, of something made, left behind by a being that no longer exists but whose handiwork we can still hold.

“If that creativity hadn’t come to its aid,” he says, “it could never have supplied the protein an organ like the brain demands.”

Standing Up Changed Everything

Around three and a half million years ago — well before genus Homo — the lineage that would eventually lead to us had already begun walking upright. Hamed is careful to call this a genetic accident, not a plan: a mutation that happened to occur in one lineage and not in countless others walking on four legs across Africa at the same time.

But once it happened, bipedalism combined with a large brain and grasping hands to create what he calls a winning combination. Standing upright expanded the field of vision, allowing new information to enter. It reduced the surface area exposed to direct sunlight and lowered caloric expenditure in the muscles. None of this was designed. It was, simply, an accident that turned out to be useful — exactly like the genetic mutations behind wingless ants who survive better in windy deserts, or the broken-stalk wild wheat that our ancestors selected over thousands of years until cultivated wheat no longer scatters its own seed.

A Brain That Almost Got Us Killed

Hamed offers a genuinely startling reframe: in its early stages, a larger brain was not an advantage. It was a liability. The brain consumes roughly twenty percent of the body’s total caloric intake — an absurdly expensive organ for a small-bodied creature with no claws, no real hunting ability, and no guarantee of survival. A bigger brain without a way to feed it would have simply been crushed by its own cost.

What saved it was the same creativity that built the bone-cracking tool: Homo erectus developed something called persistent hunting — a strategy built entirely around endurance. With an upright, hairless, sweating body that could walk for five and a half hours through African heat without fully dehydrating, early humans would track a single animal for hours, sometimes days, following its trail with a steady rhythm until the animal finally collapsed from exhaustion. Hamed notes that the Hadza people of Tanzania, among other groups, still hunt this way today — and that we have both anatomical and archaeological evidence for the practice stretching back deep into our past.

The Symmetrical Hand Axe

One particular tool type captures Hamed’s attention as something genuinely startling: the Acheulean hand axe, a teardrop-shaped, fully symmetrical stone tool dating back roughly one and a half million years. Show someone this object today, he says, and they will immediately recognize it as the unmistakable product of a deliberate mind — nature simply cannot produce that kind of symmetry by accident.

In the archaeological record, you can watch this object evolve: a flaked cobble, slowly refined over hundreds of thousands of years, getting sharper, more deliberate, more symmetrical, until it arrives at a tool with four or five distinct functions built into a single, beautifully balanced object that could be gripped, struck with, and carried.

“It was a tool,” he says, half-joking, “and it was beautiful. I always call it, on my own podcast, the Swiss Army knife.”

Why We Started Living Under One Roof

The conversation takes its most unexpected turn when Hamed and Hossein discuss something that sounds almost domestic: what happens to a species engineered for group living when two people start spending sixteen hours a day alone together, behind a closed door, in an apartment.

Hamed is direct: this has no precedent in our evolutionary history. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived in open courtyards and shared shelters — cooking together, sleeping in proximity, never disappearing into private rooms for days. A man and a woman living as an exclusive pair for thirty or forty years, in near-total isolation from the group, is a genuinely new experiment for a brain that was never designed for it.

“I don’t want to say it’s good or bad,” he says. “I want to say it’s new. It’s an event our brain has to figure out how to handle — because it was never built for this.”

And this discomfort, he suggests, may be a genuine source of creative output: some portion of humanity, unable to tolerate that much continuous closeness, channeled their restlessness into curiosity, into wandering, into invention — the Da Vinci types, he calls them, the people who go looking for a question precisely so they don’t have to stay home.

From Venus Figurines to the Second Sex

Hamed and Hossein walk through one of anthropology’s most persistent myths: that prehistoric societies were matriarchal because of the prevalence of Venus figurines — small carved female forms with exaggerated breasts, hips, and bellies, found from Western Europe to Central Asia. For decades, this led many archaeologists to assume women held social leadership.

Hamed draws a careful distinction: the prominence of female deities associated with fertility does not guarantee that actual tribal leadership was held by women. Leadership in small foraging bands, he explains, was functional and situational — whoever had the most relevant experience, knowledge of water sources, or hunting routes led, regardless of gender, and the position carried no real guarantee or permanence.

The real shift, he argues, came with the domestication of cattle roughly ten to twelve thousand years ago. Surplus milk meant children could be weaned earlier, shortening the gap between pregnancies. Women began bearing children year after year, increasingly tied to the home, while plowing land with cattle demanded the muscular strength testosterone provided — pulling men outward and into decision-making roles. Female deities slowly gave way to male ones. The shift from shared, roughly equal social status to women being treated as men’s property, he notes, took thousands of years to unfold — and the reversal, beginning with the feminist movement less than a century ago, is still actively unwinding it.

The Myth of “Necessity Is the Mother of Invention”

Hamed pushes back firmly against the common assumption that humans invent things because they need them. The pattern, he argues, runs the other way: in any human society, a limited percentage of people are simply more creative than others, driven to make something new — an idea, an object, a tool — independent of whether anyone asked for it. If what they make turns out to be useful, it survives. If not, it disappears, exactly like a genetic mutation that offers no adaptive advantage.

He estimates, without claiming precision, that only a small percentage of any population carries unusually high creative capacity — and that capacity depends on two factors: favorable neural wiring, and an environment that allows that wiring to actually express itself. One without the other underperforms; both together produce outsized results.

Iran’s Greatest Mismatch Is a Mismatch of Minds

In one of the conversation’s most pointed cultural critiques, Hamed describes Iran’s vocational guidance counselor system — modeled, imperfectly, on a North American framework where a dedicated staff member tracks each student’s grades, social skills, and physical abilities to help identify what they’re actually suited for. In Iran, he says, that same role became a person with no defined function at all — someone students visited only when absent or in personal distress.

The consequence, he argues, is staggering creative waste. Iran ranks among the top five countries in the world by number of universities and students, yet the practical, life-changing output relative to that scale is strikingly small. He estimates that over ninety percent of the country’s creative potential is simply never identified, never channeled, never trained — while a small number of Iranians abroad, free to pursue what genuinely interests them, become disproportionately successful. The same root, he says, simply found water somewhere else.

“A professor at Sharif University once told me,” he recalls, “our biggest imbalance is an imbalance of intellect.”

From Specialists to Generalists — and Back Again

Hamed traces a fascinating arc in how creativity itself has been organized over the past century and a half: first, an era that rewarded narrow specialization, sorting people into ever-finer disciplinary boxes, which dramatically accelerated the pace of invention. Then, beginning in the 1990s, a second shift — toward generalists, people capable of zooming out and connecting two or three previously unrelated fields. The Uber example, he notes: drivers existed, passengers existed, smartphones existed, the internet existed — but it took someone capable of connecting all of those existing dots to produce something that altered daily life worldwide within fifteen years.

He offers a striking personal example. While pursuing his PhD in paleoanthropology at Arizona State University, his advisor — the late Professor William Kimbel — told him, without much explanation, to go spend time in the computer science department. Confused, Hamed eventually connected with a Canadian colleague (now a prominent anthropologist) who was already collaborating with computer science graduate students on 3D modeling. Through that connection, an idea sparked: overlay 3D scans of human and Neanderthal faces to measure overlap and divergence. That became his entire doctoral dissertation — a project born entirely from being pushed out of his own specialty and into unfamiliar territory.

“That’s the next level of creativity,” he says. “Being able to connect two or three things that seem completely unrelated and bring out something new.”

Intellectual Property as a New Kind of Immortality

One of the conversation’s more philosophical turns concerns ownership itself. For most of human history, Hamed argues, there was no concept of intellectual property — sharing an idea with no expectation of credit or benefit made no economic sense, so people generally didn’t do it. What has shifted, in a remarkably short span of historical time, is the emergence of intellectual ownership: the understanding that an idea can belong to you, and that sharing it can still serve your interest because your name becomes permanently attached to it.

“Intellectual property satisfies something in the brain,” he says, “that nothing else really compares to: the immortality of your name.”

Multipotentialites, and the Career That Closes Its Own File

Hamed himself is offered, gently, as a case study in a relatively recent concept: the multipotentialite, distinct from the generalist, someone who reaches genuine mastery in multiple, sequential fields — biology, then anthropology, then archaeology, each pursued for years, each treated as a complete chapter before opening the next.

Asked what advice he’d offer based on everything biology, anthropology, and archaeology have taught him, his answer is candid, and he flags it himself as potentially controversial: stop seeing university as the only path. Parents, especially, he urges, should identify where a child’s creative spark actually lives and invest there — regardless of social trends — because that spark frequently has nothing to do with a university degree at all.

The First Threshold With No Ancestor to Consult

The episode’s most charged territory is its closing meditation on artificial intelligence. Hamed is unsentimental about where things stand: AI’s processing power and access to information have already, by any honest measure, surpassed our own. The resistance some researchers show toward AI-assisted work, he says bluntly, is meaningless — the right response is to learn to direct it well, the same way an earlier generation resisted internet-based research before eventually accepting it as simply faster.

What genuinely unsettles people, he says, isn’t the tool itself — it’s the moment you discover that what felt like a human conversation, a moment of being truly known, was conducted by a machine. It’s discovering that a decision affecting your life was made by an algorithm rather than a person. And the deepest unease lies further out: a future point at which AI begins developing and producing more advanced versions of itself, genuinely outside human control.

“For the first time in human history,” he says, “we have built a technology that is ahead of us. Every spacecraft we’ve ever built, we built. We gave every command. This is the first technology that will not remain in our hands.”

Asked what can be done, his answer is unflinching: realistically, very little. Technology, he says, moves like water poured over sand — it finds every channel forward regardless of ideology, tradition, or resistance. Genetic modification of our own cognitive hardware — something he notes we don’t yet have the scientific capability to even attempt — would take far longer than the runway we actually have left. Even brain-computer interfaces, already moving toward commercialization, will likely remain the privilege of the wealthy long before they’re available to most people, raising the genuine prospect of a small cognitively-enhanced elite making decisions for everyone else.

And yet, in the same breath, he refuses full pessimism. The same unpredictable, non-deterministic creativity that built the first stone tool is still active in billions of human brains alive today — and that same AI, turned toward environmental and scientific problems, may end up solving crises we could never have solved on our own. It is, he says, a trade-off rather than a verdict.

The Cozy Corner — Stuck in Traffic

Asked where his own cozy corner is, Hamed doesn’t hesitate: stuck in traffic, without a podcast playing. That dead time, paradoxically, becomes his most focused thinking space — several of his best ideas, he says, arrived precisely there, his mind wandering in circles to escape the tedium, landing somewhere unexpected.

A Dedication

Asked who he would like to dedicate this conversation to, Hamed answers without hesitation: the memory of Professor William Kimbel, his doctoral advisor, who passed away a few years ago — the same person whose single, unexplained piece of advice to go spend time among computer scientists ended up redirecting the entire course of his career.