Since my latest post, I have been thinking about the nature of knowability. I apologize if I’m repeating myself, but I’m hopefully not. In the movie, “12 Monkeys,” there’s a scene where one guy says, “There’s no true, there’s no false; there’s only popular opinion.” I find that notion especially true regarding ancient history. When … Read more
We have previously learned that humans may have walked the land as early as ~500,000 years ago. However, the Quaternary Glaciation began around 2,588,000 years ago and ended around 128,000 years ago. I love the abbreviation for this: Last Glaciation Period – aka the LGP (in English, obviously). During this “Ice Age,” I think it’s … Read more
Before I can tell you about the three goats I saw, I need to be able to communicate verbally. So naturally, I turned to Wikipedia again to learn about the origin of language. Incidentally, the origin of language is not without controversy. Indeed, as one might expect, theorizing was banned in nineteenth century France. You … Read more
Perhaps this entry should have preceded the prior one, but hey, I am not an expert on communicating this kind of information — yet! In any case, to build a society, ya gotta be able to count things. Setting aside the quantification of so many things, it appears that the most fundamental need for numbers … Read more
Consistent with the name of this site, we have to go through a lot of “then” before we get to “now.” As we recount all the intermediate stages, you will recognize many of the names — at least I did! I will try to hit only the main points (for a while) so we can … Read more
As I mentioned, an accidental discovery around a decade ago led us to discover that the scientific timeline for human development was indeed only a theory. It turned out that crude tools had been used long before Homo Sapiens even existed. So what does this teach us? The impact on our daily lives is pretty … Read more
A genre that has never really appealed to me is “speculative history.” In my opinion, that is a recipe for disaster, cuz you’re magnifying the odds of misremembering some settled detail. As an aside, I remember a kid in middle school reading a book where these very photogenic tough guys (at least, this is what … Read more
I am writing this from the Phanerozoic eon, and you are presumably reading it from the Phanerozoic eon, as well. When describing geological time (and writing pop songs), different terms are used to describe different scales. For example, an eon is the largest unit and contains all the others, such as era, period, epoch, and … Read more
As I think about this project of organizing “the” history of the world, I see that I face obstacles ahead. Namely, a particular challenge is that contemporary life has many more layers of details, making it much more difficult to fit it into a narrative. Before Gutenberg unleashed the god-forsaken printing press on us, civilization … Read more