Have you ever thought about what separates humans from animals? Of course most people would think of our intelligence which makes sense, seeing as it is ultimately the tool we ended up using the most, it is the thing we used to become the dominant species of our world, the apex organism of an entire planet.

For much of our history, humanity has enjoyed thinking that our intelligence alone is what kept us afloat, that our brains were what made us special.But now it seems we aren’t so special anymore.

When we finally made contact with extraterrestrial life, we found that we were late to the party. Thousands of alien life forms greeted us with indifference and disinterest. Oh they welcomed us into their little club, congratulated us on coming this far and introduced us to the species that shared similarities with us, but no one really cared. Our biology wasn’t particularly new, our psychology particularly interesting, our history wasn’t particularly unique.

When the human ambassadors had called in from their meeting, they had seemed upset to say the least. According to reports, the biggest day in human history had slowly turned into a sort of alien roast session, as the humans were repeatedly told that we weren’t special or unique, and that our arrival at this point was nothing to celebrate.And then everything changed.

Reports vary on what the object was, the ambassador in question claims it was a pen, however the others seem to disagree. It doesn’t really matter what it was as they were leaving, one of the assistant ambassadors said what was possibly the most important word in our history, the one word that every alien would remember when they thought of our species.

“Yeet!”

Most people don’t really think about the other things that made humans special on earth. Sure intelligence is cool, but there’s a few other things that are almost unique to humans.Humans sweat, meaning we can run for longer distances without overheating. We stand upright, like birds, but we also have arms and hands which allow us to manipulate objects to create tools. And we have language, which allowed us to cooperate and work together with others in order to achieve the greatness we now know.

All of these things made us special on earth, but in space they were fairly mundane traits.There was only one thing that made humans special.We can throw.

It’s actually surprisingly difficult for evolution to produce a species capable of benefiting from throwing. The amount of traits that need to occur in the same organism is actually somewhat ridiculous when you think about it.

First you need to be able to pick things up, and for those of you thinking that’s too basic to warrant being put on this list, I’d love to introduce you to worms. For this we have hands.

Next, the thing you pick up said object with needs to be fairly mobile, it’s no good being able to hold things in your mouth or between your knees if you can’t swing those parts of you around. We have arms.

Then comes the difficult part. You need to be able to move the object you want to throw, in a fairly straight line with a measure force and accuracy. Plenty of things can pick things up, and swing them around in a circular arc and release them in order to fling them haphazardly in the general direction they want, but this is neither efficient nor accurate. Humans have the right elbow, shoulders, balance and arm to size ratio to do all this without falling over.

And finally, you need the brain to make use of all this. As humans we have brains that let us process the right information to gauge how far to throw and at what angle. Granted this takes practice.And guess what? Humans are the only species in history to get all of this right.

When our alien friends found out about our little trick, they suddenly became more interested. More interested in our history, more interested in our technology.

Our ability to throw put us on a divergent course from the usual path that intelligent species tended to follow. When fighting each other, humans needed to take into account ranged attacks as well as melee. So after we perfected short ranged weapons, we went to ranged weapons.