Our Natural Human Blueprint, Tribal Intelligence, and What We’ve Lost

Watching Mongolian horse-archery — warriors riding at speed, fully embodied, calm, skilled, precise — it’s impossible not to feel how far we’ve drifted from our original design.

These cultures didn’t rely on guns, technology, or convenience.

They relied on skill, discipline, interdependence, and trust in human capability — all held within a tribe.

It took me straight back to Og Mandino’s book The Greatest Salesman in the World.

I read it to my children a few years ago.

In it, he describes a self-sufficient tribal culture — where people hunted, gathered, built, protected, and raised their young together.

Everyone had a role.

Everyone had purpose.

Thus everyone had relatively healthy sense of worth/ self-esteem, value.

Everyone was needed in tribe.

And then the corner shop arrived.

Convenience replaced skill.

Buying replaced making.

Children were sent to schools instead of being prepared by the tribe.

Within a short time, generations lost the confidence, knowledge, self-sustainability, and bonded security that had taken centuries to refine.

This is not a small thing.

And it’s not ancient history.

Humans have a universal design, just like plants do.

All plants need sunlight, water, nutrients, pollination.

But no two plants thrive in the same conditions.

You don’t put an orchid in the desert.You don’t put a cactus in a swamp.

Humans are the same.

We share universal needs — belonging, purpose, contribution, safety.

But each person has unique individual needs, rhythms, strengths, gifts, talents, strengths, and roles.

Tribal cultures understood this deeply.

Children were prepared early — often from age 5 or 7 — not by one adult, but by many mentors.

Boys were taught by men of the tribe — fathers, uncles, elders — everything they needed to survive, protect, and provide.

Girls were guided by women across generations.

There were rites of passage.

Initiation moments where a child faced fear, responsibility, and returned changed.

A child left as a child — and returned with an initiated soul.

Today, we’ve largely lost this.

Which gives us the widespread dilemma of wounded petty children in adult bodies - as parents, bosses, teachers, in work-places, and positions of leadership.

We separate children from community and place them into classrooms focused on information, not purpose, place, or contribution.

We fragment families.

We isolate adults.

We expect schools and systems to do what tribes once did — and they simply can’t.

And then we wonder why we see:

• widespread loneliness

• anxiety and depression

• fragile self-worth

• loss of meaning

• chronic burnout

• disconnection across generations

This isn’t because humans are broken.

It’s because we’ve superimposed incompatible systems over our natural blueprint.

In a tribe:

• there is always more than one person to speak to

• self-esteem is naturally cultivated

• each person has a place and role

• worth comes from contribution, not comparison

Our current systems — consumerism, industrialised education, fragmented work — don’t honour human design.

Some don’t just fail to support it. 

They actively block it.

That’s why we see the mental, physical, and financial ill-health we’re living with today.

This isn’t about rejecting modern life. And it’s not about rebellion.

It’s about sustainability.

A culture and society that ignores our human blueprint — both universal and individual — is not viable long-term.

We don’t need to go backwards.

But we do need to remember what we are.

Because humans, like plants, only thrive when placed in environments that honour how they were designed to grow.

This question — how we honour the natural human blueprint in a modern world — sits at the core of my body of work as Nic Anderson Earth, and the land-based vision of SATORI Earth: restoring and exploring environments and modern-reclamation of tribes,and a where humans can reconnect, contribute, and truly thrive.