Produce it. Not a description of it — the thing. An instance of the unaugmented human, so that we can establish the baseline against which the enhancement will be measured.

Not one with fire. Fire is a technology and it rebuilt the gut and the jaw and freed the calories that grew the brain that is reading this.

Not one with language. Language is a technology; it is learned, it varies by region, it installs a set of distinctions that then appear to be perceptions, and a person raised without it is not a purer human but a damaged one.

Not one with clothing, cooking, counting, burial, the calendar, the alphabet, the plough, or a name.

Not one with a mother, since the mother installs most of the operating system and does so in a dialect.

What remains, when you have subtracted every acquired technology from the human, is an animal in the eastern African uplands with no particular prospects, and it is not a diminished version of you, and it is not the you underneath. It is a different animal, and it did not want anything you want, and it could not be enhanced into you because the path from it to you ran through two million years of objects.

The baseline is not hidden. It is not oppressed. It is not waiting to be recovered by a return to nature. It is simply not there, and the entire ethics of the last century has been written as though it were, and the bill for that is now arriving.