Originally posted, 16 Dec 10.
Three Remarkable Human Journeys
Footprints In The Sands Of Time
These ancient footprints were left about 3.5 million years ago, by two adults and a child believed to be members of the species Australopithecus afarensis, one of our direct ancestors. While clearly adapted for living in trees, they are also known to have walked upright much of the time. If you’re looking for ‘the’ link between humans and apes, and don’t want to worry too much about technicalities, I reckon this would be as good a stage of our ancestry as any to choose.
These footprints were left in the Severn Estuary, in south Wales, some 8,500 years ago, by a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer. Other prints found in the area dating to the same time period point to a good reason for him having been there. They include, along with other humans, red deer, pelicans and sheep. South Wales can boast a much longer human history than this though, remarkable as it is. The Red Lady of Paviland, discovered in 1823, is the ochre-coated skeleton of what turned out to be a man (well, it’s a mistake we’ve all made with kittens…), some 29,000 years old.
And, we couldn’t leave out the most famous footprint in history. Iconic in the true sense of the word, this is, of course, Neil Armstrong’s famous size 9½B. The last footprint left on the moon was that of Eugene Cernan, who also left his daughter’s initials scratched in the lunar dust. Cernan was also the last to drive the lunar rover, attaining a lunar land-speed record of 11.2 mph (18.0 km/h) as he did so.
The Might Of The Pen
This 5,500-year-old scrap of pottery, found in Harappa, Pakistan, may be the oldest piece of writing ever discovered. With relatively brief exceptions during the Greek and Roman periods, though, only the bureaucratic and priestly classes (often the terms would be interchangeable) would have any degree of numeracy or literacy, until well into the second millennium AD.
Anyone who knows anything about the history of the written word knows that Johannes Gutenberg was the first to use moveable type, right? Wrong. Unsurprisingly, we should look to the east, and 400-odd years earlier. Sometime around 1040, Bi Sheng in China was using wooden moveable type, soon replaced by more hard-wearing moulded clay letters. The first use of metal type is attributed to Choe Yun-ui, a Korean, in 1234. Not that this casts any shadow over Gutenberg, though — he’s surely not the first, nor the last, person ever to have independently invented or re-invented something. And, without a doubt, his moveable type, which he added to the already old technology of the screw-press, played a major role in the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, as well as paving the way to the spread of literacy and knowledge to the ordinary person. Indeed it’s hard to imagine that many of the social reforms since that time, from women’s rights to trade unions could have come about without some degree of literacy among the masses, which would surely be impossible without mass-produced, cheap books.
In 1989, Tim Berners Lee, working as a contractor at CERN, wrote a proposal for “a large hypertext database with typed links”. The problem he was looking at was that because of the huge variety of makes and models of computers used there, there was no practical way of sharing data, other than to print it off (reams and reams of it, for any typical experiment), and manually enter it onto the new machine, in a format it could understand. The project eventually became known as ‘The World Wide Web’. He built HTML, and HTTP, the first server-software and the first browser. Oh, and the first web pages. In August 1991, he made the code available for free, and without claiming any property-rights, on the internet. As of 16th December 2010, those few pages have grown to at least 6.98 billion. Quite what the social impact will be, no-one knows for sure. At the moment, I suspect the changes — not just in hardware but in how it’s used — are coming too thick and fast, with novelty-based bandwagon-jumping and banner-waving standing in for long-term trend-analysis, for anyone to really see the woods for the trees. The first picture ever posted on the WWW, if you’re interested was this one, of CERN-based parody pop-group, Les Horribles Cernettes “the one and only High Energy Rock Band”, which leads us quite neatly to…
Pictures Of Home
Taken in 1839, this is one of the oldest photographs in existence. The subject is photographic pioneer, mathematician, chemist and astronomer, John Herschel’s 48 inch telescope in the grounds of his home, in Slough. Son of noted astronomer Sir William Herschel, he named the seven then-known satellites of Saturn: Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, and Iapetus, and the four then-known satellites of Uranus: Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon.
The first photograph ever taken of the whole Earth (the Wikipedia caption, displaying a somewhat over-zealous sense of technical correctness, adds the words ‘by humans’), from the Apollo 8 spacecraft, in December 1968. I’ve seen claims that this is the most reproduced photograph ever, but I’d bet my money on the famous Che Guevara picture taking that record. That one though, merely served as an empty gesture of rebellion for disaffected teenagers and pie-in-the-sky Marxists, while this one had profound effects. Membership of ecology and anti-nuclear-weapons groups rocketed (pun unintentional) after the Apollo 8 flight. There was our planet, home to every living creature known to exist, alone in a huge black void. Suddenly the fragility (a word it seems impossible to avoid) of our home was shown for all to see. And no-one had even thought, ahead of time, to take it. The crew were supposed to take pictures of the lunar surface, and this one was taken purely on a whim! You’d think they’d have learned a lesson from that, but no…
This one wasn’t scheduled either! Not, at least, until Carl Sagan suggested it. It was taken in 1990 by Voyager 1, from a distance of 3.7 billion miles, as the craft was about to leave the solar system, and shows the Earth as what has become known as ‘the pale blue dot’. It seems only fair to leave the last words to Sagan: “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.”
—Carl Sagan (he’s the brainy one), and Daz
fabulous