By: Robert L. Hays
Through his writing on human nature, civilization, social development, and the evolution of society, Robert L. Hays is developing a body of work that asks readers to look at humanity from a much longer perspective.
What if understanding the future requires us to understand the distant past first?
That question sits at the heart of the work of Robert L. Hays, an author whose writing explores human nature, social development, civilization, and the forces that have shaped humanity over immense spans of time.
Rather than approaching history simply as a collection of dates and events, Hays is interested in a much larger question: How did human beings become who they are, and what can that understanding teach us about where humanity should go next?
A scientist, author, independent philosopher, and grandfather, Hays brings a perspective shaped by decades of interest in biological science and the development of human societies. His work examines the values and principles that influence human development, while encouraging readers to think critically about the assumptions that often shape our understanding of humanity.
His published work includes What Is Your Life About?, Mastering Your Life as an Individual, Mastering Your Social Life, Values and Social Development, and Western Civilization, along with collections of his Grandpa Hays writings and Substack posts.
Across these works, a common theme emerges: Hays wants readers to think for themselves.
Through the Grandpa Hays Project, he extends that mission to younger generations, sharing ideas and life lessons intended to encourage curiosity, critical thinking, and a deeper understanding of the world. His goal is not simply to accumulate accomplishments or recognition, but to make meaningful ideas accessible through thoughtful writing and affordable books.
Now, Hays is taking that intellectual journey even further with an ambitious upcoming Stone Age novel.
The project brings together many of the questions that have occupied his thinking for years, including human evolution, social development, innovation, cooperation, relationships, survival, and ultimately the nature of civilization itself.
Rather than presenting the distant past as a collection of simplistic stereotypes, Hays is interested in imagining our ancestors as intelligent, creative people confronting problems and developing solutions, even when the archaeological record cannot tell us exactly how every aspect of their lives unfolded.
That approach reflects the larger philosophy behind his work: sometimes understanding humanity requires looking beyond what is immediately visible and asking what can reasonably be inferred from the evidence we do have.
For Hays, the past is therefore not simply something to study.
It is something that can help us understand ourselves.
And perhaps, ultimately, help us think more carefully about where humanity goes from here.
His published work already reflects that interest.
Among his books are What Is Your Life About?, Mastering Your Life as an Individual, Mastering Your Social Life, Values and Social Development, and Western Civilization: Based on the Gap Theory of Human Nature and Natural Law. His Grandpa Hays’s Guide to a Successful Life series and collections of his Substack writings further explore questions surrounding individual life, social relationships, values, and civilization.
Together, these works reveal a consistent intellectual interest: understanding people not simply as individuals, but as participants in a much larger human story.
Looking Beyond the Conventional Timeline
Hays’s current project takes that inquiry much further back.
His forthcoming Stone Age novel seeks to imagine the lives of early humans during a period when much of the story has been lost to time.
The challenge is enormous.
Archaeology can reveal artifacts, bones, settlements, genetic clues, and other fragments. But countless aspects of everyday prehistoric life leave little or no surviving evidence.
How did early communities organize themselves?
How did knowledge pass from one generation to another?
How did different bands encounter one another?
How did people respond to loss, danger, migration, and environmental change?
And how did humanity gradually develop the technologies, relationships, customs, and systems that eventually made civilization possible?
Hays’s approach is not to present every imagined detail as historical certainty. Instead, he is interested in using reasoned inference to explore possibilities where the archaeological record remains incomplete.
That distinction is central to the project.
The novel is not simply asking readers to travel into the past.
It is asking them to think about the past differently.
Giving Our Ancestors a More Human Story
One of the most compelling ideas behind Hays’s Stone Age work is his belief that ancient humans deserve to be viewed as intelligent, creative problem-solvers.
Modern readers can easily underestimate people who lived without modern technology.
But the absence of surviving evidence does not necessarily mean the absence of ingenuity.
Hays’s reconstruction explores the possibility that early humans developed practical solutions to problems because circumstances demanded them. Some of those solutions may have left little archaeological evidence behind.
That creates an intriguing space for the novelist.
Where evidence exists, it can provide boundaries.
Where evidence is missing, careful inference can help construct a plausible human story.
The result is a world in which early humans are not merely background figures in an archaeological reconstruction. They are people, making decisions, forming relationships, adapting to changing circumstances, learning from one another, and trying to survive.
From Individual Life to Civilization
There is a clear connection between Hays’s earlier work and his forthcoming novel.
His books examining individual life and social development ask readers to consider how people function within relationships and societies. His writing about civilization broadens that inquiry, examining how human values and social structures develop over time.
The Stone Age project takes the question to its origin point.
Before cities.
Before written history.
Before modern institutions.
Before civilization as we recognize it.
What were the foundations?
Hays is particularly interested in the relationship between human nature and the environments in which humans evolved.
For thousands of generations, humans lived under conditions dramatically different from those of the modern world. Modern civilization has transformed those conditions at an extraordinary pace.
Technology has changed the scale of human interaction.
Population has expanded.
Resources are managed differently.
Social institutions have become enormously more complex.
Yet human beings remain products of a much older evolutionary history.
Understanding that tension may be essential to understanding many of the challenges facing modern society.
A Prehistoric Story With a Modern Purpose
That is what makes Hays’s upcoming novel particularly interesting.
Although its setting is thousands of years in the past, its questions are unmistakably modern.
The story asks readers to consider how humans cooperate, how knowledge spreads, how communities adapt, how relationships shape survival, and how innovation changes the trajectory of societies.
The emergence of new technologies and relationships with animals becomes part of that larger story.
Even the earliest stages of domestication can be viewed not merely as archaeological milestones, but as examples of human curiosity and experimentation.
A new animal appearing among a community could have been extraordinary.
People would observe it.
They would learn from it.
They would experiment.
And eventually, knowledge could spread beyond one group to another.
In that sense, Hays’s prehistoric world becomes a laboratory for examining one of humanity’s greatest characteristics:
our ability to learn from one another.
The Bigger Question
Ultimately, Hays’s work is less about nostalgia for the past than it is about understanding the present.
His writing asks readers to step back from the immediate concerns of modern life and consider humanity on a much larger scale.
Where did our values come from?
Why do societies organize themselves as they do?
Which aspects of human behavior are deeply rooted in our evolutionary history?
And if the world around us has changed dramatically, what does that mean for human beings going forward?
Those questions don’t necessarily produce simple answers.
Hays appears comfortable with that uncertainty.
In fact, uncertainty is part of the intellectual appeal of the project.
There are enormous gaps in what humanity can know about its deepest past. Rather than ignoring those gaps, Hays uses them as an invitation to explore.
The Next Chapter
For Robert L. Hays, the Stone Age novel represents more than a departure into historical fiction.
It brings together themes that have appeared throughout his earlier work: individual development, social relationships, human values, civilization, and the evolution of society.
And it may ultimately serve as the beginning of an even larger conversation.
If humanity can better understand how it arrived here, perhaps it can begin asking better questions about where it should go next.
That is the ambitious idea behind Hays’s continuing work.
His readers are not simply being invited to look backward.
They are being invited to look backward in order to look forward.
And perhaps that is the most important reason to revisit the story of our ancestors.
Because the distant past may contain more than forgotten history.
It may contain clues about who we are today, and what kind of future we are capable of creating.
