12-01-07

The History of the World (No, Seriously)
Preface and Chapter 1
It has long been my ambition to write an unabridged and definitive history of the world.  I am, as many folks know, a big ol' history geek, and much of the arcane trivia locked in what we'll laughingly call my brain is related to history or the social aspects of history.  I have no intention of doing this alone.  If you think you can whip out 500-1000 words on the subject of any period in history I will gladly include your writings (after editing) in the overall collection.  The collection will be linked from the Casual Notes Archive.  It will, however, have its own table of contents, segregated by general age of the world.  I hope to write one entry per month at minimum, but we'll see how that works out.  If I remember to do so, I'll link pertinent sources (or footnote them if they're paper sources).  So, let's get started, shall we?

The Beginning of time and the ascent of man
It all depends on who you ask, doesn't it?  Scientists seem to be more or less in accord that billions of years ago, the universe sprang forth from a superdense point, a point so dense that the distinctions between matter and energy were moot.  This superdense point may have been the dying remains of a previous universe.  Everything expanded, energy cooled and became matter, then it collided and became energy again.  Cloud-galaxies formed, condensed, gave birth to stars and died.  At some point, the Milky Way Galaxy also formed.  Stars were born and died there. 

A couple of generations into the whole mess, a swirling cloud of hydrogen and other, heavier elements from older stars gave birth to our own sun and the 9 (or 8, or 10 if you consider Pluto and Charon a binary planet and not a—okay...that's a long side discussion...) planets that orbit it.  Actually there was probably another planet originally, but it was pulled apart by Jupiter, which was always a big bully.  During this process, when the orbitals had more or less congealed, but before they had fully solidified, something smacked into the ball of hardening gas that would eventually be the earth, and the moon was formed.  This is important information.  Without the cycling tidal forces of the sun and moon, our planet would probably not be tectonically active, and would, like Venus, simply undergo worldwide catastrophe every ten thousand years or so, as the mantle got too hot and just flipped the whole thing inside out.

Anyway, so you have the sun, the moon, and the earth.  Stuff started happening.  Okay, stuff had probably already happened elsewhere, but since we aren't there and are unlikely to visit there in anyone who matters' lifetime, we'll just say that it only happened here...that we care about.  Most importantly, life happened.  Evolution's a funny thing.  It's a selective process but it's also not.  Even a casual look at the evolutionary timeline shows the process to be one of fantastic speciation and expansion followed by a long period of refinement and specialization.  Life develops along certain lines and it looks like one variety of animal or plant will find a way to fill all the niches in the ecosphere, then BAM! an Extinction Level Event (ELE) occurs and within a few million years, the survivors have expanded everywhere and speciated from their original selves into millions of different varieties.

So about 65 million years ago, the most recent of those ELEs wiped out the dinosaurs.  For a few million years, it looked like birds might take over and force a second reign of the dinosaurs (birds are really just dinosaurs with better tailors), but they started arguing over a shiny piece of string, which gave the mammals their opportunity to take over.  Eventually, one of these mammals, a protosimian that was developing an orbital thumb (this is a thumb that, due to its unique joint can both oppose and comply with the rest of the fingers), decided to come down out of the trees and walk in the grass.  I say "decided" because that makes mankind's ancestors sound decisive.  What probably really happened was that the trees were coming down, and they could either learn how to survive on the newly forming Ice Age grasslands, or they could curl up in a ball and die.  They learned to walk erect; they learned to make and use tools.  Most importantly, they developed symbolic language.  At some point, these animals that weren't quite men (but were rapidly becoming them) worked out between themselves how to make sounds in a structured and common way so that "Put the rock on the stick and tie it there with the vine" sounded completely different from, "If you hit your sister one more time I swear to God..."

Somebody figured out that wherever they spit seeds, new plants grew,  Someone else figured out that cows and goats were really pretty stupid, and instead of chasing them around, you could keep them in one place and just whack them dead whenever you got hungry, so long as you fed the rest of them.  Dogs figured out that slouching around and helping out was a whole lot better than getting hit with sticks.  Cats also showed up at some point.  Little things that we take for granted happened.  The idea of sculpting mud around a wood frame to make a shelter is still with us (seriously—we have better, sharper angles than some early builders, but the basic premise remains).  Mankind spread out in groups that became peoples and dominated six of the seven continents.

Or the Christian God got bored one afternoon and decided to build a universe to play with. 

Or Shiva built the universe from the ashes of the old universe (which he, coincidentally, had destroyed).

Or a giant duck laid an egg on a turtle's back.  It doesn't really matter.  What matters is that the world began, and mankind began, and they would have to spend a few thousand years getting to know one another.