Who was the last person to know everything there was to know?

This was an essay I wrote for my IB Theory of Knowledge class in 11th grade that I think is funny. I remember being given this assignment and feeling extremely frustrated by how senseless it seemed. Originally written in September 2015.

This topic brings up the question, what does ‘everything there was to know’ mean? We could mean everything humankind knew at that point, everything humans were capable of knowing or discovering, or just everything. For the purpose of this essay I will consider it to mean everything humankind collectively knew at the time. Another question the topic raises is, what is knowledge? How do we define ‘knowing’ anything? In this essay knowing means thinking you know something that can and has been proven to be valid - a justified true belief. I take the view that the last person to know everything there was to know was the first person to exist. This implies that there was at least a moment when there was only one human in the world, which will also be my first argument that I will attempt to prove using natural sciences. My second argument is that while they were the only person to exist there was no other human knowledge than their own so they had to know all of humankind’s collective knowledge, which I know through reason. For my third argument I imagine that as soon as there were more humans, new acquirable human knowledge came to be that not all humans could acquire.

My position on the question implies that there would have had to be a time when there was only one existing human. The theory of evolution tells us that new species (including humans) are originally formed by gene mutations and every mutation must have had a first appearance in the world. Therefore there must have been a single first human. However, the line between human and non-human is difficult to draw. We do not know which mutation it was exactly that created the exact species, but there must have been a specific one. We also do not know how much time there was between the first appearances of the mutation, but it is very unlikely that there was more than one first appearance that both happened at exactly the same time. We can assume there was at least a moment when the first case of the human mutation was the only one in existence. Therefore, there must have been a first human.

As the first and only human in existence, they would have had to know everything there was to know. There were and had been no other humans to expand collective human knowledge further than this one human’s personal knowledge. Therefore, the first human knew everything there was to know while they were the only human.

Once there was more than one human in existence, humans’ collective knowledge expanded. As soon as this would have happened, human knowledge could not have been contained in one person any longer. There would have been knowledge that the other humans would not have shared with everyone else, even if it was something as small as the knowledge that there is a red squirrel on a certain tree at a specific point in time. Since speech and communication was not very advanced in the first humans, it is likely they would have only communicated knowledge they considered important to each other. Less important knowledge is still knowledge, so we can conclude that once there was more than one human there was not a human who knew everything there was to know.

As I have shown, there was once only one human in existence. This human must have known everything there was to know, until more humans came into existence. In conclusion, the last person to know everything there was to know was the first human in existence.