We live in interesting times. A sentiment that can be justifiably expressed by every human being all over the world throughout history. As if we are impressed that anything should be happening whilst we are alive. But we are all living history and not just in the political and nation-state senses.
Physicists test out their theories on how the cosmos works by seeing if the equations create the universe as we see it, because if it creates everything but the grass turns out to be blue then it’s wrong somewhere and likewise, although we could not easily divine it from this fact, we are the secret of how it works because we are here and all that we are necessarily flows from how the cosmos works.
And if you still want to know more about merely human history you can see from our brains and our DNA all that we have come from, where we branched off to evolve differently and how we are still ruled by instincts that served our progenitors well but sometimes leave us flawed and exposed. The search for companionship, the settling of communities, the division of labour are all part of our non-thinking selves that we try to believe are a part of our intellects.
Ultimately in the field of essences these things cannot define every human being because they are not part of every human experience. A human without love is non-the-less human, a hermit is human, a self-interested person is still human. The essence of humanity is not an equation or an expectation and most definitely not a theory.