Humans are symbol-minded creatures.
A useful new behavior could spread to an entire community in a single generation, not thousands, and could be abandoned just as quickly when it outlived its usefulness. But nature is indeed a mother, and few gifts come without price. The price of our ability to symbolize is, very often, the loss of the ability to distinguish the symbol from the thing it represents. Forget all your Marxist crap and Maoist bullshit. The most revolutionary words in human history are still those scrawled on that famous yellow parchment which many people claim to admire, but which few have read and even fewer still have understood.