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A recent discovery in Cloggs cave, Australia, revealed something extraordinary about humanity’s relationship with time. Several metres into the limestone grotto, archaeologists working with the Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation found of an ancient ritual: two ceremonial sticks covered in animal fat and highly specific burn marks. Here is the amazing part. The sticks were 12,000 years old, and they were almost identical to ones used for rituals in the late 19th century by local mulla-mullung, or sorcerers.

That means the GunaiKurnai people are the inheritors of what researchers called the “oldest-known culturally transmitted ritual”, one practised continuously for 10,000 years before the Julian calendar even began.

For archaeologists, the cave ritual also suggests that people 12,000 years ago already had a conception of history and the future. When humans return to the same place to do the same things time after time, we can hypothesise that they are maintaining a record of past deeds and are planning to do them again on a day that has yet to happen.

It is exactly what we do in the modern world when we rely on past experiences with, say, train schedules to figure out how early to leave for the station. Despite grandiose claims to the contrary from professional prognosticators and tech executives, there is nothing fancy about predicting tomorrow. We have been doing it since the Stone Age.

Yet currently it seems impossible to think about the future, at least beyond the horizon of your next cup of tea. There are a lot of reasons for this: political instability, the rapid pace of scientific progress and climate chaos, to name a few. But with a better understanding of where our idea of the future comes from, it can be easier to start planning for what comes next.

Cloggs cave offers a good origin story of how humans discovered “the future”. If we remember doing a ceremony in the cave yesterday, or 50 years ago, we can start to imagine doing it years from now. This is the foundation for a so-called cyclical view of time, where tomorrow is cast as a version of yesterday. It is ideal for human endeavours like farming and nomadic travelling, both of which require people to repeat year-long cycles so they have adequate food and shelter.

Perhaps you were taught in school, as I was, that older civilisations thought cyclically about time, but the post-Enlightenment world has converted to a more linear concept, where the future accelerates rapidly away from the past. Problem is, it just isn’t true. Indeed, the engineers who worked in Egypt 4000 years ago would laugh if they heard you suggest they couldn’t imagine a future of major change. Have you seen their pyramids, miles of paved roads and giant palaces? You simply can’t create massive, multi-generational projects like the Valley of the Kings without a strong sense of linear time and the ability to foresee a coming world that looks very different from the present.

Humans have always viewed the future in both cyclical and linear ways. We know the daylight will return as it has for millions of years, and we also know it will illuminate wild new stuff that never existed before – like the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Still, people living in the past few centuries have really become obsessed with the wild new stuff. We can blame H.G. Wells for popularising the notion that the future will be incomprehensibly alien, totally unlike our world now. Though his novel The Time Machine was fantastical, it reflected a broader cultural view during the industrial revolution that history hadn’t prepared us for what was coming next. Eventually, we might evolve into competing post-human species of underground Morlocks and surface-dwelling Eloi. Echoing Wells, futurists today declare that humans are either on the brink of becoming hyper-evolved cyborgs or paper clips on the desk of a godlike AI.

Stories of a radically different future reassure us that humanity will continue making progress. But maybe we should consider that not everything needs to change. I am not suggesting that innovation is bad – I am a big fan of modern medicine and space flight – but we ignore the importance of cyclical stability at our own peril. Our environment, for example, would be in better shape if we had focused on sustainable agricultural practices inspired by the past.

When our visions of tomorrow come unmoored from history, the future becomes indistinguishable from a fantasy like The Time Machine. And that can have dire consequences. Catch my column next month to find out how the future was mutated in the 20th century and beyond.

Annalee’s week

What I’m reading

Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World, a fascinating survey by Guy D. Middleton.

What I’m watching

The People’s Joker, a satirical movie about a dark future where all comedy is controlled by the US government (which is controlled by Batman).

What I’m working on

Taking more walks.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Stories Are Weapons: Psychological warfare and the American mind. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com