How do we humans spend our lives? All of us. Of all ages, in all time periods, urban and rural, at all economic strata. Are there daily, ordinary things that we do no matter where or when or how we do or did them and no matter what else we do differently?

I believe there are. What follows are some activities and concerns that would have been familiar even to early humans tens and even hundreds of thousands of years ago. The list is hardly complete; nothing here about sex or family or sleep or dying. Rather, I’m looking for items that we might overlook but that fill our waking hours.

Such a view into the past has, for me, a grounding effect. Like the turn of the seasons and weather, these continuities help make up a foundation on which our histories have been built. They make up a frame of necessities and habits within which we have invented, conquered, suffered and rejoiced through the centuries.

1. Food. Whether we gather it, hunt it, grow it, buy it at Shoprite, cook it over a fire or in a microwave, eat it at a restaurant or take it out, food demands our time and attention every day and in return, if life is good, brings us nutrition and companionship.

• Walking. We Homo sapiens appeared about 300,000 years ago. But our human predecessors had already been walking around East Africa for two million years before that. They stood out because they stood up. Walking on two feet instead of four gave them a better view of their whereabouts and freed arms and hands to carry spears, babies, and later rifles, pens, and paint brushes. We’ve never stopped walking. Our predecessors began migrating out of Africa and up to Europe, across Asia, and over and down through the Americas. Since then, we have traveled farther and faster with the help of horses, cars, planes. Yet walking is still the body’s way to go–for pleasure, in restlessness, to get to the neighbors, for health or curiosity, to work off anxiety. We even ask, How many steps today?

• Location. Early H. sapiens 300,000 years ago knew the locations of berries to pick, animals to catch, water to drink, places to avoid, the stars in the sky. Locations—and the routes going from one to another—have been part of the necessary knowledge  for planning battles, laying out fields for planting, choosing sites for a castle, fortress, or office building, the best neighborhood to buy a house, the best room to put the couch in. As realtors say: location, location, location.

• Hands. Walking tall freed the hands of our human predecessors and our H. sapien hands have kept us busy since then. I’m watching my hands as I type this, reach over for my coffee, pick up a pen to make a note, open a book to check a date. Later my hands will  help make dinner, then clean up, then pick up the TV remote, then pick it up again, check my phone, check again. Guided by our eyes and brains, refined through our fingers, hands put us in company with our ancestors who chipped flints, picked berries, shook hands.

• Me, You, Them.  By around 100,000 years ago, spoken language was fully evolved. (Such well-endowed modern humans form the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens.) Language stimulated and was in turn stimulated by our increasingly complex social lives. Much of this development appears in miniature in human self-talk. Our conscious mind constantly talks to itself about itself, about other selves, about what we want to say to or do with those other selves. The likes of “I’m going to tell Jay I didn’t like what he said to Mary” zip through our head. We gossip, tell stories, debate, discuss who to trust, who has money, how our team is doing. We are entertained by sagas and dramas and comedies of gods and heroes and villains. We mingle, cooperate, and laugh with people whom we don’t know at all individually, and we punish and attack groups who seem to be a threat. Contradictory though it may be, we crave to be both closely knit with others and, at the same time, our own person. Not easy. See today’s newspaper.

• Sounds, Sights, and Imagination. Among our senses that are switched on when we’re awake, hearing and seeing may be the most rich. So it’s not a surprise that we have explored ways to please those senses beyond everyday sights and sounds.. Music may have begun with percussion, flutes, or chanting. And images of the animals that we hunted could be painted on rocks for all to stare at and worship. Today we sing, dance, and dazzle ourselves with images, tones, and rhythms.

• Techniques, Technology, Science. The roots of technology and science are intertwined with the vitality of our social existence. Techniques emerged as one person showed another a better way to chip a stone, plant a crop, build a hut or temple, bake a cake, ease a headache, program a computer. We take our place in this tradition when we talk or think about how to do something or how to do it smarter or better. Science grew from this process but, more mundanely, so has planning a meeting or a schedule or a vacation or interest rates.

These routines and abilities make up much of the main road of the journey of our species. They have been passed on genetically and culturally from one generation to the next. If we look at just the past 100,000 years, that’s 1,000 centuries, and if we allow about four generations per century, that’s about four thousand generations–four thousand generations of humans around the world growing up, getting food, cooking, eating, talking, traveling, making friends, making homes, making things, thwarting enemies, singing, dancing, worshipping, planning, thinking. A heritage to wonder at.