YOU NEED TO KNOW YOUR HISTORY

You need to know your history because you need to know how to think. You need to
know how to think so that you don't spend the rest of your life in a mental fog, spouting random
nonsense about things that confuse you, all in a desperate attempt to Sound Important.
But wait, you protest, I already know how to think!
We know, we get it: you're smart. In fact, so powerful is your big brain, you could tell
the person sitting next to you how many times the word "know" appeared in the first paragraph
without peeking. You can't? Well, why not? This is why: you weren't warned before reading this
paragraph that you would have to use your big brain to count words. You were not told how to
think about what you were reading in a way that provides an answer to the question.
Even if you are the rare reader who happened to get the count (three) without guessing or
some other mental chicanery (which would put you in less than 2% of thinkers, and is Not a
reflection of IQ, but of Thinking Patterns), you need only reflect on a moment in your past when
you didn't understand how something operated--perhaps a magic trick or a combustion engine. In
all three scenarios above, had you been told what to look for, understanding what was going on
would have been simple. It would have been simple because you would have understood how to
use your brain to glean the necessary information to answer the questions at hand. When you
know where to look, you know how best to focus your study of a subject.

You see, having intelligence is not the same as understanding how to use it, and it
certainly isnt understanding why you should use it. Those things take time, and are only attained
by those willing to do the difficult work of Learning How to Think. So, who are you? Which path
do you choose? The world is filled up with intelligent children, but rare is the adult who knows
how to think, because people never learn how to use their big brains.
A proper study of history teaches us a general model with which to use that brain. As a
famous person once said, "History is philosophy with examples," and philosophy is nothing
more than the study of problems. If we turn our attention to the events of the past with the mind
to understand them, especially the parts that make little sense to us, and if we do so consistently,
we will develop a cohesive set of principles and mental tools for addressing questions in
general--a system of problem solving (Thinking!) that will serve you for the rest of your life. It is
a system that will help you focus and use your intelligence to your best advantage, so that what
you say Is Important because you are Not Confused. You need to know your history.
If you do not, you consign yourself to Not Knowing, which is an awful state to be in. In
such a Confusion, only two types of people exist: the Simpleton and the Fool. The Simpleton
believes anything that is told to him, and the Fool believes anything that he tells himself. Now,
people do not arrive at these conditions because of any lack of innate intelligence. They do so
because they never learned how to use their brains. For the Simpleton, the world is a bewildering
rush of ideas, facts, and figures with no logical or coherent structure. The Fool has it even
worse, because the Fool believes that his half-baked ideas, whatever they may be, are superior to
whatever evidence is at hand. This presumption kills any chance that you have of learning
anything at all. Imagine that your favorite musician were walk through the door right now and

begin to tell you how to craft music as wonderful as their own. Would you begin to talk over
them, telling them how you make music? It is an absurd notion, isn't it? This is how the Fool
spends his life. You obviously do not want to be like that. So important is this idea that it presents
us with the first piece of our Intellectual Toolkit: Intellectual Honesty.
Now, this is a term that means a lot of things, and we will get to many of them throughout
this text, but most important for us is that we are Humble before our Evidence. Historians allow
the evidence to guide them to better understandings of the past, much like you would let your
favorite musician teach you how to write a good song. If the evidence is good (more on that
later), then we often have to admit that our original view of a subject was wrong. Though that
might sting a little, it certainly is better than the alternative; the Fool refuses to admit that he is
wrong, and so either ignores the evidence or twists its meaning into something completely other
than it is. By not being Intellectually Honest, the Fool traps himself in a fantasy world of faulty
logic and misused evidence. We will henceforth call such fantasy Bad History.
Bad History comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, from people who are simply wrong
about the minor details of history all the way up to people who believe Hitler was just
misunderstood (such people exist!). You will see many examples of Bad History over the course
of your life if you keep your eyes open.
To do so, though, we must avoid Bad History ourselves. We have already made a start by
deciding that we will do our best to be Intellectually Honest. To that end, I must tell you now that
in the following pages, I will probably make some mistakes, and will definitely come up with
interpretations that others may argue against. This is only natural. No history is perfect, but all
historians may avoid the label Bad Historian by simply being willing to correct claims and

arguments when presented with better evidence or use of evidence. In short, you can avoid Bad
History by always being willing to engage other people in an honest discussion about history. In
fact, Good History engenders conversations and scholarly argument about how ideas and
evidence should be handled--Good History makes everyone involved Better Thinkers.
So then, how do we start the process of separating Good History from Bad? The first step
is to Pay Attention to What You Are Studying. In fact, the close reader of this introduction
already knows the next set of tools she needs. At the bottom of the first page and top of the
second, certain words are italicized. What are they?
Have you found the answers? Excellent. Write them down somewhere--in a notebook or
even in the margins of this book (write everything down!). These words are your most important
tools in the study of history. By constantly applying them to what you are reading and what you
are being told, you can learn how to discern evidence from claims, strong reasoning from weak,
and good sources from bad. In short, you will be in a good position to begin weeding out the Bad
History. For instance, there is a quote in the second paragraph of the second page of this work.
Who wrote it? When? Where? Why was it written? For all you know, I could have made the
quote up out of thin air! I didnt, of course, because that would be the worst type of Bad History:
fabrication, otherwise known as lying. The quote is attributed to one of the founders of western
history, the Greek historian Thucydides who lived in the fifth century BCE.
So we have our answer--or do we? Read that sentence again. Ask questions of it. What
does that word attributed mean here? Does it mean that he didnt really say it? To find out
would require finding more sources and asking more questions of them. We will leave this little
mystery alone for now, though you are free to pursue it on your own. If you dont, do not worry;

we will return to it later on in the course, right about the time that we come to a study of
Thucydidess era. In the meantime, look out for Good and Bad history, pay attention to the things
that improve your Intellectual Toolkit, and always--always--ask questions.

THE RIVER
Imagine the flow of a major river, perhaps the Mississippi. From far above the planets surface,
the river looks like a long muddy line painted across the green continent, with a massive tangle
of smaller linesthe rivers tributariesmerging with it as it flows to the sea. Beyond that, we
cant discern much else. If we drop down many thousand feet, we begin to see more detail in the
rivera sand bank here, a barge therebut at a cost. The closer we come to the river, the less of
it we can see.
No longer can we hold the entire
length and breadth of the river system in our
field of vision. Our view at once becomes
more of one thing and less of another. Now
imagine that we drop further still, until we
are just a few hundred feet above the river.
The river now looks quite large in our view,
and we can pick out fine details. We can
Fig. 1: Maps are a great way to get a grip on historical events. Often
times you can make connections by looking at them and reflecting on
what youve learned.

count the number of trees that line the

banks, tell which woodlands are flooded and
which are not. We can see swirling eddies

and currents pushing against one another. We can even see the larger pieces of driftwood and
debris that the river has pulled into its flow. However, at this level we can only see a single bend
in the river. What we are experiencing here as we descend altitude is a sense of scale.
In order to investigate the river,
we must know which scale is best to
answer our questions. At the largest
scale (the macro scale), we can map
out the entire river system and do such
things as compare the tributaries to one
another. Where does the Red River
enter the Mississippi? Is it before or
after the Tennessee River? What is the

Fig. 2: we must always keep in mind that maps reduce complex

landscapes into simple lines on paper. To understand the river at this
scale, you would do best to travel here.

length of the main channel? These type

of questions are very large in scope and speak to the system as a whole.
At the other end of the spectrum we find the micro scale. At this level, we can only see a
single bend in the river, but we can answer questions at this scale that we cannot answer at the
macro level. For instance, what type of trees line the banks? Is the water here shallow or deep?
Are there signs of erosion? Does the water show evidence of pollution? In between these
extremes, we find answers to other useful questions: how heavy is the river traffic between
Memphis and Baton Rouge? How many bridges cross the river in that same span?
The answers to the above questions depend on using the proper scale. If I were to attempt
to answer the question what type of trees line the river by investigating the macro scale, my

only possible answer would be green ones, which is no help at all. Attempting to count how
many tributaries feed the Mississippi by observing the micro scale is likely to produce the singleword answer none, and that is obviously incorrect.
Before we move on from this business of rivers and their scale, we should point out a
simple but vital truth; rivers and their environment change as they go along. Although we are
able to answer more direct questions at the micro scale, we must keep in mind that our answers
only speak to that particular stretch of the river. The answer to the question what trees line the
bank will differ depending on where we make our observations. We must pay attention to the
context of our point in the river. Context is made up of the things which surround the river and
provide a backdrop that is essential to our understanding. Though not necessarily directly
involved with the river itself, context helps us more fully understand the answers to our
questions. To understand context, we must ask additional questions: what latitude and longitude
are we observing? What time of day and year are we making our observations? What important
aspects of the river upstream may impact the portion of the river we study? These are essential
questions to answer if we want useful answers to our major questions.
Now then, why all this discussion on rivers in a book on world history? Simply because a
river is an excellent analogy for time. I am sure that at some point in your life you have read or
heard the phrase the flow of time. Just now, I typed in the phrase river of time into Google,
and it returned 174,000,000 hits (thats right, almost two-hundred million). Much as the flow of a
river pushes us steadily downstream, time pushes us along from the past toward the future. Just
as it is difficult to swim upstream against a river as powerful as the Mississippi, it is impossible
to swim upstream against the current time.

Furthermore if we are floating downstream, all that surrounds us, from the driftwood to
the boats to the water itself, was brought to us by that river. All of our surroundings, even the
vegetation that drinks greedily along the bankindeed, all but the blue sky overheadwas
crafted by the river. This is exactly the same as our place in time. The flow of time has brought
us everything in our lives right now: the clothes on our backs, our friends at our schools, even
the flowers in our yards, to name a few. Much as we can answer questions about the Mississippi
river by looking at it from different scales and considering different contexts we may answer
questions about our present place in time by doing the same. What currents pushed against one
another to create your town? Your Country? Your civilization? Imagine for a moment if those
currents had been different. Would you still have the friends you do now? Would you be living
where you are? Would you even have been born? We will never know! That is because those
currents *didnt* flow differently.
What we can study, however, is *how* and *why* those historical currents flowed as
they did. Such study can give us compelling and useful perspectives on the world around us.
They also tell the most amazing stories, because in that river of time, wars have raged, tyrants
ruled, civilizations fallen, lovers have decided the fate of nations, and humans have crafted
works of great wonder and might.
However, our analogy is not perfect. Earlier, we imagined viewing the river from above.
This is useful to see the types of perspectives and scales that we encounter in the study of history.
The problem, though, is that the historian is himself stuck in the flow of time. In other words,
there is no way that we can remove ourselves from the river and rise up in the air to see how the
river sprawls across the land. What, then, can the historian see, floating along the rivers surface?

The answer is, well, not much. We can only see our immediate circumstance. We cant see
beyond the bend upstream (well call that the past), nor can we see what the river has in store for
us beyond the next bend (the future). We are stuckirrevocably weldedto the present. In fact,
we cant even see all of the present, because we must exert so much energy on merely remaining
afloat.
How then, floating along this watery mess in which we cant see very far, are we to know
*anything* about the past? What could we look for to help elucidate what came before the last
bend? Perhaps there are other people floating alongside us who are older, and have therefore seen
more of the river than we have. We could ask them and record their oral histories and
mythologies. However, memory fades and twists, and at best these people could only have lived
through a handful more bends than you. Well, what about that bit of driftwood floating over
there? It could have floated past many many bends in the river: an artifact of long ago. Perhaps
we can tell what type of wood it is, and by doing so what types of trees line the bank far
upstream. Unfortunately though, wood cant speak so we can only learn so much from it.
Perhaps, then, we can compare what the older people have said about trees to the driftwood. If
they say that three bends ago they floated past a stand of cyprus trees, and the driftwood at hand
is indeed cyprus, then we have fairly solid evidence that there is a cyprus forest upstream. These
different pieces of evidence about the past collectively are our sources. It is with such sources
that we glean what happened long ago. There are three general types of sources, but we will
return to all that in a bit.
However, as is, our collection of sources is pretty poor so far, just some memories from
older folk and a scrap or two of driftwood. Then a miracle happens, a soggy gift from the river

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floats up to us: a journal. Somehow, somewhere far upstream and long ago, someone was able to
write down all they know about the world around them and their experiences in it. In fact, this
happens from time to time, and you have been able to collect a few written sources. Together, all
of these writings make up the core of what historians call the historical record. It is the heart of
the historians study. With it, what was guesswork now becomes a lot more certain.
But wait, you say, what if the person who wrote the journal was lying or was simply
wrong in what he saw? You would be correct to ask! The astute historian absolutely does so.
But who does she ask? The only answer is to compare the claims in the journal to what
we already knowto the rest of the record. Of course, this is far from perfect because the
historical record is by its very nature incomplete. What about all the stories that people forgot to
write down or all the journals that sank to the murky riverbed? They are irrevocably lost to time,
but barring a magical machine that can pull us from the muddy water and deposit us, God-like,
far above the river of time, it is all that we have if we wish to understand where we came from.
This is not to disparage those other sources: the artifacts and the common mythologies of
a people. In fact, entire Academic Disciplines exist to study those unwritten sources; Geologists,
Archaeologists, Anthropologists, and Paleontologists all work toward making those sources
understandable to us. However, an artifact alone is silent, and has no one to tell us its story
unless someone wrote that story down.

HISTORY & THE PAST

Lets elaborate on the concept of sources a bit more, particularly that written portion that is the
anchor of the Historical Record. So important are those written records that we cannot have

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history without it. Where there is no record, there is only the past. The past is everything that has
happened in the course of time all the way back to the beginning. Every person who has ever
lived, every thing that has ever occurred, every anthill, every city, every meteor that streaked
across every ancient skyeverything that ever wasis contained in the past. History is not the
same thing. History is the story, or better yet stories, that we tell about the past. Those are very
different things! The vast majority of the past lies outside the bounds of our history. Even if we
were to take that smidgen of the past that contains the human species, all 200,000 years or so of
it, only a fraction of it occurred during a time when human had the capability to write stories
down (in fact, only about 1/40th!). Even since people learned to write, most of the past *still*
wasnt recorded. People didnt care, forgot, didnt know how, or simply chose not to write down
a record of an even. And remember the problem of the journals that sunk in the river? How much
has been lost that way? Time is incredibly hard on things. It uses them up, wears them down, and
leaves no trace.
So now let us concentrate on those stories, those histories, that we have about the past.
And I do mean story. It is the very definition of History. English gets that word from the
medieval French historic, which means, literally, story. But the word goes back even further
than that! It goes all the way to the ancient Greek word Historia, and that means to find out.
Find out what? The story, I guess. Even that long ago word had an origin though, the Greek word
Histor: wise man. Somewhere in that etymology is a lesson to be had. Perhaps it is that a wise
man is one who listens to the stories that surround him.

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PREHISTORY
Though outside the bounds of the written record, it is still of great use to our study of
history to investigate what we believe came before the Historical Era. In that distant past, we find
the context into which human history is born. But how do we make a study of what came before
the record? The historian is at a loss and must turn to the expertise of those other disciplines
mentioned above. The Geologist studies the Earth to bring ancient landscapes to life. The
Paleontologist studies Earths Fossil Record to help us understand life in the Deep Past
everything from the origins of the planet straight through to
the dawn of the Historical Era. Anthropologists study the
way people live, and in so doing make conjectures about
how people lived in the past. Finally, Archaeologists study
the human past by examining what historical peoples have
left behind, their households and cities, their kitchenware
and clothing. All three of these professions have made
possible a robust if fuzzy portrait of what came before the
written record, and we will rely heavily on their expertise in
Fig. 3: a fossil of the Phorusrhacid family of
birds, also known as Terror Birds. Standing
at over 9 ft. tall with a beak like a battle ax, the
largest of these birds definitely earned the
name.

the following pages.

In fact, we will need even more help than they can provide.
If we are to get an accurate view of our context at its largest

scale, we cannot stop with the beginnings of humankind, or even of the Earth. We must not only
leave our familiar spot in the river far below us as we jet upward to broaden our scale, we must
leave Earth itself behind! Farther still, we must pull back the lens until our entire solar system

13

comes into view, and then our Milky Way Galaxy, all the way out to the largest scale of allthe
Universe itself.

THE VASTNESS OF TIME

The Universe provides for us our ultimate context. It is, literally, time and space at their
most grand. The Universe is so large in fact, that we cannot comprehend its scale. It is impossible
to hold in our heads a vision of how much time has passed from the beginning of the Universe
until now. We have to cheat; we have to use our sense of scale to come to terms with it, and even
then only in our most poetic moods do we have just a glimpse of an idea of its age, and it leaves
us dumbfounded.
To deal with this, we divide time into useful chunks. The first division is the one between
Historical Time and Prehistory. In Historical Time, we count the passing of time in hundreds and
thousands. In Geologic Time, we use millions and billions. To denote this, when some idea or
fact demands a date in Prehistory, we will use the abbreviation YA for Years ago, instead of the
more familiar BC/AD and BCE/CE abbreviations that we use for historical time. So then,
whereas Caesar was murdered in 44 BC (or BCE), the Earth formed about 46 billion YA.
Whenever you see this or some other marker of deep time (such as the more common BP
Before Present), remind yourself that you are dealing with incomprehensibly large chunks of
time. Its great practice for honing our sense of scale.

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15

If you spent any effort at all taking in the contents of the previous illustration, it took you at least
three minutes. How long would it take to trace back to the origins of mankind, about 200,000
YA? At that scale, it would take you thirty-six pages and about 1-3/4 hours. As monotonous as
that would be, it would not even begin to prepare you for the leap in scale necessary if you
wanted to get back to the origins of Earth. To do so would take 836,363 pages! If you worked on
nothing put tracing lines on paper for twelve hours a day everyday without skipping, it would
take you 9 1/2 years. If you went back further to the birth of the universe, you would have to
trace almost 2 1/2 million pages, and that would take 28 1/2 years!

THE BIG BANG

About 13.7 billion YA, a time so long ago that we must turn wholly away from the realm
of history to the fields of Physics and Astrophysics to make sense of it, there was an explosion. It
was not by any means the normal type of explosion that you see replicated in action movies; It
was an explosion that created everything in the known universe.
In a fraction of a second, everything that ever was or will be was ejected from a point so
very small that scale once again betrays our ability to understand. This event is known as the Big
Bang, and it is still going on as the universe races faster than the speed of thought to fill the
blank spaces of non-existence.
After the initial event, the Universe went through a great period of rapid expansion that
saw the development of the basic building blocks of matter, things with interesting names like
quarks, photons, protons, and electrons. This process took five thousand years to take place, a
staggering amount of time for us but an almost meaningless fraction of time compared to the

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history of the universe. In any case, when the Universe was a mere five thousand years old,
enough matter existed for gravity to begin pulling everything together. Four hundred thousand
years later, we see the emergence of atoms and molecules.
Over the next 700 million years, basic elements began to accumulate into great clouds of
matter. These clusters were the raw material of galaxies. As gravity continued its work, the
massive pressures that resulted created incredible friction, itself causing an equally staggering
amount of heat. This heat energy worked alongside gravity to slowly produce the universe that
we know of today. Massive balls of gravity and energy fuse hydrogen atoms together to create
helium atoms, releasing massive amounts of energy in the form of blinding light, heat, and solar
radiation. These are the stars that light up our night sky. Over time, some of these stars collapsed
in on themselves as their structures could no longer bear the intense pressure. These became
Black Holes. Objects of unimaginable gravitational pull, many black holes drew together into
clusters and pulled staggering numbers of stars into orbit around them. By this process, those
great interstellar clouds became galaxies.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy is about 13 billion years old. It is a spiral galaxy, with
great arms slowly rotating around a galactic center composed of a great many black holes. It is
just one of many many billion galaxies, but it is our home and provides us with everything we
have ever known. If you look up on a clear night, you can see one great arm stretch across the
skythe Milky Way.
About 4.6 billion years ago, a remanent of the great dust clouds floating around the Milky
Way Galaxy began to pull inward on itself in a solar event that created a star of middling
magnitude surrounded by dozens of globs of matter, themselves products of gravitational force.

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These accumulations of matter orbited around the star and revolved on their axes. Over time,
these processes smoothed them into orbs. These of course are the planets and moons of our solar
system, and the star is our Sun. Eventually, the third orb out solidified into solid and liquid form.
And thats how the world was created.
Or at least that is our best guess as modern humans. Other people in other times had
different guesses as to the origins of the Earth. Indeed, even now there are astrophysical models
of the universe that claim no beginning to the universe. What a notion! But why then, is this
section titled The Big Bang, and not The Big Nothing? In other words, why does modern
society claim the Big Bang as Truth? I am not completely sure that I know, but I believe the
answer may have something to do with how we define what Truth is.

DIFFERENT TRUTHS
Have you ever asked yourself why you think something is true? Is it because you actually
know it to be, or is it because youve researched it, or because, well, kinda like, its just, umm,
true? This is an important question to ask. Otherwise, you risk becoming the Simpleton or the
Fool. After-all, how did the fool get to be so foolish? Why does he call some things true but
not others? Why do you? Why does anybody? And why do all these Truths compete, disagree,
and attack one another?
If you will allow me, I would like to propose a Thesis on the issue. Well, I suppose I
have already, way back on the very first page! Way back then, I conjectured that Fools become
what they are because they never learn how to think. I guess another way of saying it would be:
People often believe untrue things to be true because they were the victims of bad thinking.

18

This means that we arrive at truth through thinking, and the quality of our thoughts lend
themselves to either accurate or inaccurate visions of that truth.
But what does it mean to think? In order to establish my thesis, I am going to have to
provide solid claims that support my it, use good evidence as proof of my claims, and
demonstrate that Im not using trickery by defining terms and not purposefully fabricating any
information. After-all, the good historian never wants to griff his reader!
So then, first I will define the word think. For this, turning to a dictionary will do us
little good; Merriam Webster alone has nineteen definitions and sub-definitions. Thats a lot of
truth! So then, I will provide my own. So long as it is clear, within the bounds of the general
definition, and the term is used in a consistent manner, it is generally acceptable to do this in an
academic paper. Just make sure not to take liberties!
For us, thinking has the following qualities; it involves asking and resolving questions; it
is complex; and it is a process. Thinking also has an object. That object can be abstract or
concrete, existing wholly in the realm of ideas or in the physical world around us. For the
historian, the object is obvious; the historical past provides us with our objects. As we will find
out later, historical thinking is both abstract and concrete. In order to help lay out my thesis on
what is good and bad thinking, I will later use historical evidence. So then, there is my first claim
down: a good definition of what we do when we think.
My second claim is this: there are ways of thinking that are bad. They are bad because
they give us a faulty vision of the world around us. The misinformed worldview that is born of
bad thinking makes the world a bewildering, threatening place. We become hostile to new ideas
and angry at those who disagree with us.

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This claim implies that there are also good ways of thinking. These ways of thinking
make the world more easily navigable and increase our general confidence about our place in it.
These lead us to relish the world around us and embrace its absurdity.
My last claim is that while no human strictly does one or the other, we can always
become better thinkers. We do so by being determined, humble, and patient people who
constantly strive to ask more questions of the world around us, realizing that the answers may be
more complex than we were hoping for, and willing to be led back to asking more questions
whose answers lead to even more complexity in a process that always asks more of us and
returns even more! Well, that was a mouthful of mores, but my last claim is summed up
nonetheless.

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The very beginning of the universe provides us a wonderful point to pause and reflect on
exactly what we mean when we say that something is true. This is because it represents a point
that we simply have no evidence one way or another of what lay beyond. The problem is
definitely very tricky and involves unresolved questions. However, lots of people have tried
answering those questions. They have come up with answers that they believe are true about the
universes beginning although they can never fully even know if it had a beginning!
You are perhaps most familiar with two versions: the Hebrew and Christian creation story
found in Genesis and the scientific origin story given above. You perhaps also believe that these
two stories are completely opposite one another. This would be a fair assessment if they were the
only two possible versions of how the universe began, but they arent. Things are not that black
and white; they are much more complex than that.
What I laid out above was a vision of what occurred after the Big Bang. It is, perhaps,
wildly incorrect. We cannot know at this point in history. What the future may know is a mystery.
What is more, we have absolutely no clue about what happened before the Big Bang. All
scientists can do is look at the tangible evidence at hand, make a guess based on that evidence,
and then test it by comparing predictions to outcomes.
In the past fifty or so years, there have emerged a great many scientific possibilities about
what came before. Some say that there was absolutely nothing. This type of thought is called ex
nihilo, which is latin for out of nothing. Others theorize that there was another universe before
ours that expanded from a single point and retracted back to it before doing it all over again to
create us. Still others say that evidence suggests that we are just one of many universes.

21

There are also religious visions of the creation of the Universe. These come in all types of
forms and are limited only by human inspiration. An old Chinese story tells us that the universe
is the product of a man named Pan Gu who hatched from an egg and made the world out of his
body and the egg shells. The ancient Mesopotamian story says that the world is formed from the
bones and skin of a terrible dragon that the hero Marduk slew. For the Norse, we are the products
of melting snow. According to Hindu spiritual texts, the great god Brahma has dreamed us all
into existence! And finally, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, a singular God spoke us into
creation.
All those different versions, and people still say one story or another is the true one! In
fact, people get very angry at one another over this. I wonder what type of thinking they engage
in when they are angry? It isnt hard to find out, actually. All one has to do is to is find an online
chatroomany will do, how about a Yankees fan site?and type in the following phrase:
How badly has religion harmed science?

or alternatively,

How badly has science harmed religion?

It doesnt matter which you personally prefer. Hit enter, sit back, and enjoy the pandemonium
youve unleashed. Dont forget the popcorn! in the nuclear meltdown that ensues, you will get all
kinds of saucy truths. Indeed, you will have drawn a stark line down the middle of the site as
people clamber to tell each other the truth!

22

What you will see is a lot of bad thinking bandied back and forth as true. Some will say
that the Dark Ages was the fault of religion. Others will bark back that, scientists have
persecuted christians! only to be countered with, if it wasnt for the Catholic Church, wed be
living on Mars by now!And then, if you are very lucky, a voice from left field will jump in the
fray with: Scientists dont want you to know about electromagnetic crystal theory; theyd be out
of a job! or some such nonsense.
It will seem to you that everyone will have an answer. The problem, of course, is that
there is no willingness to listen to each others differing ideas. This absolutely destroys the
ability to engage in the aspect of thinking that requires dealing with questions. Questions and
answers are not one way streets! We must remember that thinking is a process, and as soon as we
stop asking questions, we stop the process. Importantly, these questions must be honest
questions. In other words, they must genuinely be seeking an answer. This is tricky, because
sometimes you think you are asking a question when what you are really doing is looking for
someone to tell you that your answer is correct. Real questions do not presume answers.
A hint that someone isnt asking honest questions is that he will protest that his truths
are the facts. The funny thing is that he may not even know that he is engaging in weak
thinking, but will be nevertheless. Have you ever stopped to think about what exactly a fact is?
Probably not, and certainly not if you are spending time arguing about the Universes origins on
a baseball fansite.
Alright, enough joking around; we need to really ask ourselves what a fact is. Otherwise,
we might be using the phrase its a fact! to stop asking questionsand hence, stop thinking.
Here again the dictionary does us little good:

23
FACT: 1. a thing done: as (a) obsolete : feat or
(b) : crime <accessory after the fact>; 2.
(archaic) performance, doing; 3. the quality of
being actual : actuality <a question of fact hinges
on evidence>; 4. (a) something that has actual
existence <space exploration is now a fact>, or
(b) an actual occurrence <prove the fact of damage>;
5. a piece of information presented as having
objective reality.

The first two entries dont even apply to our discussion, and the rest have problems. For instance,
definition three gives us the synonym Actuality. Here is that words definition from the same
dictionary:

ACTUALITY: 1.the quality or state of being actual

2. something that is actual : fact, reality
<possible risks which have been seized upon as
actualities T. S. Eliot>

Notice that the word fact is used as part of the definition? For our purposes, that is as useful as
saying a fact is a fact is a fact. Entries 4 and 5 seem to be working at cross purposes; Entry 4
uses fact as something that exists in reality whereas Entry 5 uses fact to mean something that
is claimed to exist in reality. Those are two very different things! So what do we do with this set
of ideas we call facts? How about nothing?
Well just leave the notion of facts out of our thinking process altogether. Instead, we
will use evidence as the base of our argumentation. The difference here is how the two words,
fact and evidence, make us think about the world around us. Whereas fact often serves as
an end to thinking, the word evidence is a challenge to think more. Here is its definition:
EVIDENCE: 1. (a) an outward sign : indication; (b)
: something that furnishes proof : testimony;
specifically : something legally submitted to a
tribunal to ascertain the truth of a matter

24

Notice that this definition does not deal in absolutes. It makes no sweeping generalization about
what is true, though it is the only definition so far to contain the word truth! When we begin to
think of the world around us through the lens of evidence instead of fact, we challenge ourselves
to not think in simplistic terms such as black and white, right and wrong, good and evil.
This is because evidence deals not with truths, but with probabilities. Evidence can
only point to greater or lesser likelihood that something is true or not. With evidence, the door is
always open, questions always remain, and there is thinking always left to be done. As soon as
we stamp something with the impenetrable word Fact, the door slams shut, questions
evaporate, the process of thinking grinds to a halt, and all the complexities of the world around
us get painted over with simplistic single-word answers such as right and wrong.
Where the word facts gives you the comforting feeling that all questions have been
answered, evidence gives a messy pile that must be sorted out in some logical orderand that
is a process. To engage in this process, we constantly have to ask ourselves, what does this pile
of evidence mean? This of course creates more answers that lead to more complex
understandings that lead to more questions! We cannot simply stop and say, facts are facts are
facts. That is the same as saying, because, well, kinda like, its just, umm, true?
If we continually step up to the exhilarating challenge of finding out what our evidence
means, we will soon develop an interpretation of that evidence. It is in the interplay between
Evidence and Interpretation that you will discover your best visions of truth.
Because fact can mean both evidence or interpretation (Entries 4 & 5 above), it is quite
easy to become confused, and both definitions blend into one another until they are meaningless.
This is how our Fool lives his life. he never learned that his understanding of reality is built from

25

interpretations and evidencehe just calls everything he agrees with facts. He certainly never
clearly understood that in history, there really isn't such a thing as a "fact," only evidence and
interpretation. Furthermore, he never learned that his use of "facts" is driven by his interpretation
(which he would deny that he has, claiming complete objectivity). Why? Because he so firmly
believes that the world is built out of these facts that all connect together in perfectly
understandable ways. He never admits that his set of "facts" from which he draws his
conclusions may merely be his interpretation of evidence. In other words, he never questions
things critically because to him, well, facts are facts are facts.
Because of this, when he turns his attention to a new subject, he generally believes the
first or second thing someone tells him, regardless if it is a result of bad thinking or not. From
that point on, he claims that he knows the truth because he has the facts. Because he stops
thinking once he has the facts, the fool never learns the complex process of asking questions
and generating answers for a complex world. It really doesnt even matter what you believe at
that point; if you do not actively pursue evidence and answersdo not think!you will have a
poor vision of what truth is. Well, as a wise man once said, theres a sucker born everyday.
With all the modern popular fighting and bad thinking over whether or not Science and
Religion are friends or enemies, it might come as a surprise that historians have discussed this
issue for well over a century and have come to an answer that they can generally agree upon.
Historians call such an answer a synthesis. The historical synthesis on this issue is that Science
and Religion have been neither friends nor enemies; they are much more like frenemies.
A historical synthesis is not some random, hasty conclusion that someone comes up with
and writes down in a book somewhere. It is a process of complex thinking (starting to get

26

repetitive, eh?) over time by a great many people. It is not posed as some Immortal Fact before
which we all bow; it is presented as a Big Problem that we can all Investigate, and that is much
more fun and useful.
A little over two centuries ago, philosophers constructed an image of how people come
up with ideas about truth as a group. We call it the Hegelian Dialectic after one of those
philosophers, Georg Hegel. A dialectic is a discussion between two or more people with differing
views with the purpose of figuring out what is true. It is composed of three parts.
The Hegelian Dialectic
1.

Thesis: After observing the world around them, someone makes a statement about the world that he or she
believes to be true.

2.

Antithesis: After reflecting on a given thesis, another person finds it to be unsatisfactory, inadequate, or just
plain untrue. To rectify this, that person puts forward a new statement.

3.

Synthesis: After lots of thinking, researching, and debate about the thesis and its antithesis, people come up
with a new statement that keeps the good qualities of both and gets rid of the bad. The synthesis is always
more complicated than the first two, and thus is generally going to be more reflective of actual life.

Another philosopher who lived during Hegels time, Immanuel Kant, gave the following
example of a thesis and antithesis, one that is quite pertinent to our larger discussion:

Thesis: "The world has a beginning in time, and is limited with regard to
space."
Antithesis: "The world has no beginning and no limits in space, but is infinite,
in respect to both time and space."

In regard to our current example, historians have achieved a rough synthesis for the past forty
years or so. The short answer that historians of science have come up with to the question How
badly has religion hurt science? is well, its complex. A bit longer of an answer might be no
more than it has helped. How about a longer answer: The two disciplines of science and

27

religion have a complex history which at times has been mutually beneficial, at others
antagonistic, but mostly somewhere in between. Notice how complex that idea is? This
synthesis must be the result of a lot of thinking! Now, how did the historical community come up
with this?
In 1869, an American historian by the name of AD White gave a lecture he titled The
Battlefields of Science. In it, he offered up an argument called the Conflict, or Warfare, Thesis
that became the driving vision of Scientific History for a very long time. Here it is, in Whites
words:
In all modern history, interference with science in the
supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious
such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst
evils for both science and religion

The general idea of the Warfare Thesis is that Religion has at almost all points stopped humans
from scientific and technological advancement. Though historians have moved on from this
view, we still have a great many people who hold a popular view that is very similar to this.
By the middle of the twentieth century, historians had found too many problems with the
Warfare thesisit just didnt hold up under the weight of historical evidence. Because the
argument no longer reflected the mainstream scholarly view on the issue of science and religion,
an antithesis soon emerged. Think about the Warfare Thesis; can you guess what its antithesis
might be?
The answer to the Warfare Thesis was most powerfully put forth by sociologist Robert K
Merton, who argued that religion helped produce scientific societies. This has generally been a

28

much better received vision of the past. However, there were problems with this argument too.
As historians debated over these two answers to the issue, eventually a much more realistic view
view emerged that most historians could agree with. Here it is as given by historians David C.
Lindberg and Ronald Numbers:
Historical investigation has revealed [that religion and
science]-as intellectual systems, as institutions, and as objects of
personal commitment-have rubbed against each other,
sometimes comfortably, sometimes with destructive force. In
the future, we must not simply ask "Who was the aggressor?"
but "How were Christianity and science affected by their
encounter?"

So our answer isnt simple, it isnt easily arrived at, and it isnt going to satisfy everyone,
but it is much more reflective of the world we live in than answers that rely on generalizations
and simple black/white thinking. It is the product of lots of intense thinking and debate over a
very long time by a great many intelligent and reasonable people who have devoted their life to
studying the evidence and figuring out the problem at hand. In history, we call this thinking and
debate the historiography of a subject.
Meanwhile, as historians have tried to figure out the impact on one another of science and
theology, scientists and theologians have argued over the resolution to Kants thesis and
antithesis above. They have done so by much the same process; engaging in a dialectic over the
problem that deals with pertinent evidence and attempts to come up with an honest answer.
Though the issue is not fully resolved, the majority of honest thinkers who have expertise in the
field of cosmology agree that the theory that best fits our current evidence is the Big Bang.

29

We have taken quite a detour here, but we have made some very important points about
good thinking and the nature truth. In all the examples above, after a group of scholars has had a
long time to think, reflect, and and debate one another, they have arrived at a mutual answera
synthesisthat, although not perfect, is a rich and nuanced description of the world that a
reasonable, honest person can accept as the best view of the experts.

ORGANIZING THE DEEP PAST

Once we have a vision of Earths beginnings constructed out of an interpretation of
evidence that has been tested over time by professionals and that a reasonable person could call
true, we still have quite a long way to go to reach the Historical Era. In that time, such a
plentitude of important events occurred that scholars have found it necessary to make quite a lot
of divisions to the Geologic Time Scale. There are a great many of these, and they quite
commonly overlap. At the most Macro end, our time divisions are called Eons. Eons consist of
vast sweeps of timefrom hundreds of millions to even billions of years long. These eons are
divided into Eras. Eras themselves can be several hundred million years long. Periods are the
last and shortest time divisions that we will deal with at the Geologic level. It is important to note
that we will also use eras and periods when we reach history proper, and we will probably use
these terms in the more loose, general meaning of the terms as well. For now, we will defer to the
Geologists vision of these things.
There are four Eons in Earths Geologic Time Scale: the Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic.
and Phanerozoic. The Hadean Eon was the oldest of this group, lasting from 4.6 billion to 4
billion YA. To envision what the Earth must have been like during this eon, one only must

30

contemplate its name, which it borrowed from the Greek god Hades, lord of the underworld.
Earth began this era as a mass of molten material prone to frequent volcanic eruptions. It had no
atmosphere as we know it, and so someone standing on the planet would have suffered the
extremes of brutal cold and dark as the surface rotated away from the Sun and the unbearable
light and heat as dawn turned to day, and only if one could survive the poisonous vapors and lack
of oxygen that made up the limited atmosphere! By the end of this eon, both the Moon and
oceans had formed, as well as an atmosphere and temperature range much more like our own.
The Archean Eon lasted from 4 billion to 2.5 billion years YA and is characterized by a
lot of the incredibly slow movement of landmasses that we call tectonic movement. At this
time, though the Earth had an an atmosphere not unlike our own, that atmosphere was nearly
devoid of oxygen. However, even in this seemingly hostile environment, something incredible
happened, an occurrence that still is not understood: life.
It is during the Archean Eon, about 3.5 billion YA, that the very first chemical constructs
that we could consider alive show up in the Geologic Record. We call these single cell simple
organisms Prokaryotes. These cells are different than our own because they lack a nucleus. You
have probably run into prokaryotes yourself. All bacteria are prokaryotes; if youve ever had
strep throat, then you have actually been attacked by a prokaryote! It is also during this time that
the all-important process of photosynthesis first takes place.
The next eon, the longest of the bunch, marks some dramatic changes in the story of life
on Earth. The Proterozoic (time of early life), lasting from about 2.5 billion to 550 million YA,
sees the development of heavily oxygenated air, the first cells with nuclei called eukaryotes, and
the first multi-celled life. All three of these events appear to have a connection with each other.

31

Regardless, it is during this period that algae and Jellyfish-like organismsthe oldest
multicellular life on Earthmake their debut. However, all life on the planet at this point did not
add up to much at all. We cannot imagine the Proterozoic as an era in which algae and jellyfish
ruled the world. Indeed, it is perhaps better to view life on Earth as quite a rarity during this eon.
About 550 million YA, a mere 1/8th of the entire Geologic Timeline of Earth [1/25 of
cosmic time!], something incredible happened; the number and variety of life absolutely
exploded. In fact, the beginning of our eon, the Phanerozoic (550 million YA to the present) has
been dubbed the Cambrian Explosion because of the wealth of life that appears during the
Cambrian Period of the Phanerozoics Paleozoic Era.
If youll notice, we have just jumped scale, from Eons to Eras. We have gone from the
very most macro scale of Earth time one step down towards a more understandable time frame.
However, please remember that we are still talking about amounts of time that the human mind
fails to put into proper proportion with our more mundane units of years, decades, and centuries.
Nevertheless, during the Paleozoic, which lasted from 550 million to 240 million YA, an
abundance of life sweeps across the planets face. This era, whose title means time of old life,
was dominated first by invertebrate organisms such as trilobites and many other creatures that
seem bizarre to us. Eventually, true fish came to dominate the seas while ferns, the first terrestrial
plant life, spread inward from the ancient coastlines of islands and the great super-continent of
Pangaea. Soon after, the first land animals slithered and crawled ashore. In the early swamps of
the Carboniferous Period emerged amphibians, reptiles, and synapsids (our ancestors).

32

The end of the era, the Permian Period. saw a tragedy of titanic proportion: The Great
Dying. During this event, more than 90% of all living species died out. What is more, this event
was not the first but the third such event of its kind in the fossil record.
After this massive extinction, life struggled and fought
back, and did so in big ways: dinosaurs! The Mesozoic Era, lasting
from 240 million to 66 million YA, has loomed large in our
collective imaginations since the Reverend William Buckland first
described one of their creatures for the Geological Society of
Londons scientific journal in 1824.
Fig. 6: Besides being the first
person to envision dinosaurs,
Reverend Buckland avidly
pursued the hobby of zoophagy
the attempt to eat one of every
living thing. He ate crazy things
like panthers and bot flies. It is
even rumored that he ate King
Louis XIVs preserved heart!

The first dinosaurs appeared during the first period of the

era, the Triassic. It is also here that we see the humble origins of
mammals. After the Triassic comes the Jurassic Period, during
which we see the further development of dinosaurs and the
introduction of birds. Of
all the wonders of this era,

it is perhaps most wondrous that the world had never

before been graced with brilliant beauty of a birds
song. The final period of the Mesozoic is the
Cretaceous. During this period, we see the familiar yet
thrilling forms of the Tyrannosaurus Rex and
Triceratops emerge on the world stage. This showy
performance often over-shadows the appearance of

Fig. 7: Admit it, youve dreamed of this ever

since you found out about dinosaurs.

33

another thing for which the author is most thankful: flowering plants, which gave to Earth a
glorious palette of color to accompany the symphony of birdsong,
After yet another massive extinction event, possibly caused by a meteor detonation
around the Yucatan Peninsula of modern-day Mexico, we begin our geologic era, the Cenozoic
Era. Meaning New Life, this this era gives us
most species alive on Earth today, as well as a
great many species that emerged and died out
between 66 million YA and today. The first two
Fig. 8: Thats a lot of turkey. Too bad most experts
believe the Terror Bird to be a horrifying nightmare
creature that hunts you in your dreams.

periods of the era, the Paleogene and Neogene

Periods, saw the Earths continents take the

essential forms they have today. Also during this time, Megafauna, great mammals and other
creatures, emerged. Imagine the massive Paraceratherium, the largest land mammal ever at
eighteen tons, stomping about an ancient savannah, or the deadly Terror Bird hunting giant
sloths!
Finally, after a journey through time
many billion years long, we come to the last
period of the last era of the last eon, the
Quaternary. It is in this shortest of geologic
periods that modern humans finally emerge,
and even then only at the tail end of the
period. The quaternary in general is marked
by cycles of freezing and thawing on a

Fig. 9: This is a Paraceratherium. Imagine Gandalf

riding on one.

34

massive scale known as glaciations. There have been six glacial periods divided by periods of
thaw known as interglacials. In fact, it is possibleprobable eventhat we are living in one of
these interglacials and the Earth will see a new ice age a few hundred thousand years in the
future.
It is in this relatively cold climate that stage is set for that most precocious of living
species, us. After many billion years, Earth has found just the right combination of conditions to
produce the human speciesnot too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry, having too much oxygen
or carbon dioxide. How long these conditions will last is impossible to tell, although we humans
can probably make a difference depending on the choices that we collectively make.

PATHWAYS OF LIFE
An amazing journey began at the dawn of the Cenozoic era, a journey that continues to
this day. As the last of the dinosaurs died off and various smaller survivors of the extinction
clambered from their hiding spots, you perhaps could not tell that some of those animals would
establish an ancestral line destined to invent computers and drive around in cars. I am speaking,
of course, about Primates.
The early primates were not at all like us, or even like our chimp and gorilla cousins.
They were much more like our more distant relatives, monkeys. Whereas many species of
mammals were going down the evolutionary road to becoming Megafauna, primates remained
quite small. Dont imagine apes running around at this point; they are quite a recent
development.

35

In fact, the earliest primate species that we have a fossil of weighed one ounce (thats
what a slice of bread weighs!). Archicebus was a tiny little guy most closely related to Tarsirs
and Lemurs. Researchers discovered the species in China in the year 2003. A good comparison
would be to a mouse lemur:

Fig. 10: Delicious!

With competition like Terror Birds and Paraceratherium running around, you can imagine it took
a very long time for primates to emerge as the dominant species on the planet. A full 30 million
years passed by, and our ancestors were still very small. Aegyptopithecus is a good
representative species for primate development at this point. Living between 35 and 30 million
YA, Aegyptopithecus stood about 2 1/2 feet tall, weighed about twenty pounds, and probably
lived off a diet of fruit. However, there was something about the primate that was getting bigger
their brains.

36

fig. 11: My favorite image of the Aegyptopithecus. I like it

because it reminds me of your mom. Hey-oh!

A mere ten million YA or so, we see the introduction of Hominids, that family of primates that
we are included in along with all the great apes. Hominids mark a period of rapid brain
development. By far, the most famous early hominid is the Australopithecus, and the most
famous australopithecus is Lucy.
LUCY
In November of 1974, two paleontologists, Donald Johanson
and Tom Gray, discovered an ancient shinbone along the Awash River
in Ethiopia. This was one of the hundred or so bone fragments that
their team would recover in the ensuing weeks, all from the same
individual. They named their discovery Lucy, after the Beatles song
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
We believe that Lucy lived approximately 3.2 million YA. She
stood about four feet tall and weighed around sixty-five pounds. As

Fig. 12: The fossil

collection that we call
Lucy. Oddly enough,
she reminds me of my
mom. hey-oh :(

37

the most famous early hominid, Lucy has become an ambassador of sorts, traveling the world to
be put on exhibit.
There is great debate as to how australopithecus lived, but it is fairly certain that they
marked a significant step forward in humanitys timeline. And I do mean step.
Australopithecus is the first ancestor to show signs of that distinctly human trait, bipedalism.
Though other hominids can walk on two feet for short periods, they are not truly bipedal in that
their bodies are not designed to walk primarily upright.
This discovery has posed quite an interesting set of
questions: it seems that the ability to walk upright was an
extraordinarily important factor in the development of our
powerful brains. In addition to that, bipedalism allows one to
carry around and make use of things, and that sets up the next
great advancement toward us.
By 2.5 million YA, Australopithecus had left the stage
and Homo Habilis made his debut. And what a debut it was!
With Habilis came something of profound importance: tools. It
is impossible to overstate the value of tools and tool-making in

Fig. 13: this is an actual set of

Australopithecus footprints.
Australopithecusone small
step for an ape, one giant leap
for ape kind. These tracks are
three million years old!

human history. You would hardly view the tools that Habilis
used as anything remotely of use. Called pebble tools, they are exactly that: small points roughly
hewn from pebbles that could be grasped between forefinger and thumb.

38

As primitive as these tools were, they marked a development so important that all human
history is predicated on itthe purposeful creation of an instrument that aids the user in
accomplishing an end goal.
Hmm a complex thought process trying to answer the question of how to make the
world an easier place to live in, resulting in tool-makingwas Habilis our first scholarly
hominid? If we decided upon the evidence, we very well might say yes, because tool use is a
great idea! I wonder what a good antithesis to thatand what a
good synthesis to bothwould be?
Successive generations of hominids further developed their
tools and how they used them and in doing so came up with
another major step forward: a standardized tool. The Hand Ax,
fitting comfortably in the palm and carefully crafted to have a
sturdy yet sharp chopping blade, quickly spread among the next
Fig. 14: A hand ax from the era
of Homo Erectus, approximately
one million YA.

important hominid we come across, Homo Erectus. What is so

important about standardization? Well, it means that their brains
were complex enough to learn from the actions of others. This is

a form of communication and is an important stepping stone in the development of that perhaps a
uniquely human trait, language.
After all this traveling across galaxies and eons, after all the terrible disasters and
wonderful success stories that make up our deep past, we finallyfinally!find creatures that
we could hold a conversation with. Lets go meet them.

39

PALEOLITHIC HUMANS
At first, that conversation would not have been too exciting. About 160,000 YA, Homo Sapiens
emerged with all the basic attributes that we have as modern humans. Dressed in a T-shirt and a
pair of blue jeans, an early human wouldnt have stood out at all at your school. That is until you
talked to him. Early humans probably had complex speechthey were just as capable of it as we
arebut it would have likely been very unimaginative. Ideas that they expressed to one another
were most probably of a very concrete subjects: where is the water stream?; That valley has
dangerous animals in it; or Do not let the fire go out! He wouldnt have understood abstract
language and ideas such as poetry and philosophy.
However, this language allowed an increase in the number of humans who knew how to
make tools. Both quantity and quality of hand-axes, choppers, scrapers, and stone points
increased. This points to other important developments. People were not just teaching each other
how to make these tools, groups of people were teaching other groups of people in a tradition of
tool making. In fact, there probably emerged variations in that tradition and different roles within
each. Different groups would have had their own way of making the tools, and someone within
the group assumed the role of teacher. In other words, we have now not only reached complex
communication, but we are working toward the development of what we could call culture and
society as well.
It was a slow process counted in tens of thousands of yearsthe hand axe that a person
wielded 100,000 YA may have been better made than one used around 1,000,000 YA, but it
wasnt functionally any different. This wasnt because early humans were stupid. Tool-making,

40

culture, and social roles didnt change very much because they didnt have to. In an essentially
static world in which change only came with the seasons, early humans did not feel the pressure
to constantly adapt to new environments and situations.
Though their environment was fairly predictable, that did not mean that it was free from
peril and hardship. Our early ancestors lived entirely in the wilds. Have you ever been camping?
Now imagine doing it for the rest of your life with no modern clothing or tools. Could you do it?
You would have to make a shelter, clothing, and fire. How would you do all three? Even more
threatening, of course, would be the ever pressing quest for nourishment. You would awaken
every morning with a hunger in your belly and only the limited, scattered resources of the wild to
draw from. Add into that mix large predators. I doubt that youve ever felt the chill that such a
beast can stir in the human heart. The author has been in a leaky boat while an eleven foot
alligator slapped the hull with its tail, its massive jaws slightly agape. It is not a good feeling! To
be blunt, the vast majority of us would die of exposure within a few months if we were to
attempt such a life.
This threat that the natural world presented also served to slow down technological
advancement. If you are constantly cold, hungry, and hunted, you dont have much spare time to
invent new things. Lets once again think of the hand axe. Made of stone and roughly the size of
an adult hand, a tool such as this took a lot of time to make. First, the right kind of stone must be
found, and then the careful process of knapping began. Once you were through with this
process, a day has probably gone by, and you haven't been hunting or foraging. You have missed
at least a half day of vital food collection, but now you have a tool that can make all of your jobs

41

more efficient. Do you really want to make a new tool so long as your hand axe holds out? And
if it breaks, after long and good service, what tool will you likely make to replace it?
Around 115,000 YA, these early humans were beginning to leave the ancestral home in
Africa and spread into the the Middle East and beyond. Only a few small, random groups over
time turned into a steady stream. By 50,000 YA, humans had established themselves in Africa,
the Middle East, India, China, Oceania, and other points in between.
By that time, the Earth was deep into its last Ice Age. This cold environment was perfect
for megafauna to proliferate. Humans followed woolly mammoth herds and other large game.
They drew all of their vital necessities from these large animals: food, clothing, even shelter!
This means that people had to follow the herd, and thus never really settle down. The were
nomadic.

Fig. 15: Thats a lot of walking! How do you think they accomplished it? Why do you think they did it?

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Whats more, they werent alone. Homo Erectus died out about twenty thousand years
before this point, though modern humans would have lived alongside them. There were other
types of humans too; ones that survived past 50,000 YA. One was the famous Neanderthal,
named after the valley in Germany where they were first discovered, and the recently uncovered
Denosovan living in the Altai Mountains of central Eurasia.
We do not know much at all about the Denosovan, other than that we are positive that
they were genetically distinct from us. On the other hand, we know a fair amount about our
Neanderthal cousins.

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Neanderthals were a separate branch on the hominid family tree from humans. They were
shorter than we are, but they were incredibly stout. In fact, Neanderthals seem to have been
extraordinarily strongideally suited for killing large mammals with hand-to-hand weapons
such as spears. Although earlier scholars believed Neanderthals to have been more animalistic
than humans, we have found
evidence of culture among them
that seems to parallel humans.
However, by 50,000 YA, the
time left to the Neanderthal was not
long, geologically speaking. By
40,000 YA, the last of them were
gone. There are several hypothesis

Fig. 17: This is a sketch based on actual archaeological

evidence. It is amazing to think that a single resource
mammothcould provide so much of lifes necessities.

for their extinction, but generally fall into

two camps: Neanderthals, for whatever reason, could not overcome pressures placed on the by
50,000 YA, or; Neanderthals did not go extinct so much as they were absorbed into modern
human populations through interbreeding. There is evidence for both views, and the likely
answer may very well be both. Genetic research indicates that Neanderthals interbreed with
modern humans, as the Authors nearly 3% Neanderthal DNA testifies.
So then, why the emphasis on 50,000 YA? Because during roughly this time, we see lots
of things afoot. Indeed, many scholars believe that humans went through such radical change
during this period that they call it the Great Leap Forward. Starting from this point, humans take

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the last step to becoming fully like us. The story has once again to do with what was going on in
their brainsthe difference between early humans and modern humans is in the way they think.
UPPER PALEOLITHIC HUMANS
So dramatic is the change in living customs around this time that scholars of this ancient era
differentiate it from the rest of the Paleolithic by calling it the Upper Paleolithic, lasting from
50,000 YA right up until the Neolithic Era about 10,000 YA. So what changed?
First of all, tools changed. They became much better made and more diverse. Where there
was once the hand axe--essentially a multi-use tool--and its derivatives, there now were
appearing all types of new designs for different, specific purposes. These new tools were
skillfully made, too. Most were made from the most durable part of the stone: the core.
Furthermore, the deeper understanding of how stone worked allowed upper paleolithic humans
to make much more delicate instruments. This quality shows itself best in the most common tool
of the age, the flint knife. Though the first flint knives predate the upper paleolithic, they are

Fig. 18: It is by no means easy to methodically reduce a stone to this delicate shape. What is left is the best,
most resilient stone shaped into a pre scion tool.

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more of an anomaly than anything. It is the in the upper paleolithic that the number of flint
knives absolutely exploded. As far as tools are concerned, the flint knife is the masterwork of the
paleolithic era.
There are other things besides tools,
though. Human understanding of these things
changed during this period as well. Most
dramatically, it is now that we run into an
essential human activity, Art. For the first time,
humans began to express to one another their
vision of the world around them. It was a natural
world that they lived in, so art took on natural
themes. These art pieces must have held deep
meaning for the people who made them. the
beautiful figurines and objects that they produced
had to be carried around. Imagine being a
nomadic hunter-gatherer--what are you going to
carry? only what you need. Somehow, then,
these people must have believed that they

Fig. 19: This is an ancient piece of artone of the

earliest sculptures we have access to in all of human
history. Look how hes just standing there, like hes
saying, Yeah, everythings cool. Im an ancient lion
statue, and you arent

needed these art pieces.

Another way we can determine the importance of art for upper paleolithic people is by
where we find it. the beautiful murals of animals, so expertly drawn, are not generally easy to

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access. Indeed, they are in the deeper reaches of cave networks. Early people did not have
electric lighting--they had to carry lit torches with them. They also had to carry ladders, because
much of the art is on the ceiling of caves. If that isnt enough, caves had things lurking in them-big things. The Short-nosed Cave Bear was the largest bear to ever exist. Imagine that you came
face to face with such a beast in a dark cave. This was difficult, dangerous work, and they did it
anyway.
How could this jump--this great leap forward that brought brilliant art and tools-- have
happened? We dont know! Furthermore,we will never know more about this subject unless we
ask questions of it. Have you questioned what has been written here?
Or have you just kind of like, you know ? If you have, then retrace your steps back up
to the heading titled paleolithic
humans and read forward. Pretend
that the text is a defendant at a
murder trial. What is its story?
Where does it make sense? Where
doesnt it? What was left off the
page? What are other questions you
would need answered in order to
Fig. 20: Notice the wonderful blending of natural shape and
abstract expression. No think about the fact that whoever made
this had to make his own brushes, scaffolding, and paint.

understand your bigger question?

Here is some room to write down
any investigative questions of the

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previous text about the transition to the Upper Paleolithic:

There. Doesnt that feel better? Stupid author, never knowing what hes talking about! There are
many more ways of interpreting paleolithic evidence than the consensus views given above.
Take, for instance, the discussion of language. What type of evidence is there to invent such an
interpretation? After all, the first language was spoken, not written, and verbal communication
leaves no evidence--no record--of its existence. The text above reads:
Early humans probably had complex speechthey were just as capable
of it as we arebut it would have likely been very unimaginative. Ideas
that they expressed to one another were most probably of a very
concrete subjects: where is the water stream?; That valley has
dangerous animals in it; or Do not let the fire go out! He wouldnt
have understood abstract language and ideas such as poetry and
philosophy.

Is that true? Where could you find out? If you follow the Footnote at the end of this sentence,
you will find acitation that can lead you to another source than this text.1 Always look for this
essential confirmation of secondary source evidence. If you followed that link, you would find
1

Ray Jackendof, How Did Language Begin?, Linguistic Society of America, accessed: 10 Aug. 2015,
found at: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/files/LanguageBegin.pdf

48

out that the predominant interpretation of how language was developed is that there are two
primary stages.
Protolanguage is the first stage. In it, people had simple words and sentences, and
therefore probably sounded very much like how most people envision cave men speaking: Og
hungry Og eat! The second stage came about when people began to develop a logic for how
those words and sentences could be arranged; complex grammar allowed humans to use words to
describe complex ideas. Not only that, but it allowed people to describe things that do not exist
in concrete reality: Og believes that he can find food over that hill. Notice that this does not
describe the concrete location of food but the abstract concept of Ogs belief that food is over the
hill. According to this view of things, language and grammar may actually have allowed humans
to develop new ways of thinking--ways of thinking that developed things like art and specialized
tools.
There are, however, problems with this view. Take, for instance, ritual burial. It seems
that this is something that people engaged in as early as 100,000 YA. Now, there are some very
practical reasons to bury the dead, as well as emotional reasons, but why did people begin to
bury the dead with objects? does this mean that they believed that the dead would need hem? If
so, does this hint at a belief in an after-life, and thus of religion? Would that be proof of an early
ability for humans to express complex, abstract ideas? We dont know. Take some time to read
the information in the cited article above. What do you believe happened? Here is some space to
write your ideas down:

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These are fascinating questions, but we must move on for now. After-all, we still have not even
come to proper history yet. There is one more major jump that humans had to make before they
could begin making written records, and thus history.

NEOLITHIC HUMANS
About 10,000 YA, humans experienced another transition, this time spurred by their
environment. In short, the world warmed up. The last ice age ended about that time or slightly
before it. This warming engendered a catastrophe that forever changed the course of human
history: the extinction of the megafauna. Large animals such as the woolly mammoth, upon
which paleolithic people were dependent, all died off. This meant that the primary source of
food, shelter, and clothing was gone. What would these early people do?

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Fortunately, keen observers made a prescient discovery: parts of the plant that they
collected in the wilderness could be put back in the ground and grown into more of that plant.
Humans had discovered farming. This is extraordinarily important. We even define tools as
paleolithic or neolithic (new stone) based upon whether or not they were used for farming. The
invention of farming ushered in a truly revolutionary epoch in the human story, and thus we call
it the Neolithic Revolution.

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Farming allowed humans to settle down and adopt sedentary lifestyles.

The people of the time would not have known this.
Lerner
Weisdorf

NEOLITHIC
11.7 k YA end: last Ice Age, Paleolithic; begin: Neolithic, villages
8.5k YA Cattle & Pots!; stone quarrying, sea worthy boats.
7k YA halaf Culture; pottery and copper use
6k YA Ubaid Culture; mud bricks & temples @ Eridu & Tepe Gawra
5.5k YA ago: Writing!

HISTORY