A Brief History....

[poliphilo]

We are very new.

I find this a comforting thought.

When I consider the seediness, depravity, cruelty and greed of humankind, I reflect that we are only beginners. We are still practicing; we haven't worked it out yet; we have time to improve. We have been around in our present form for a few million years- nothing in evolutionary terms- and civilization- the attempt to live in a civil society- is a very recent development.

We have only had writing for about three thousand years.

The written history of my own country goes back (and then only patchily) for two thousand years. If we want to know what happened before that we have to get out our spades and trowels and dig.

Two thousand, three thousand, four thousand years- these are ridiculously brief stretches of time. We have emerged from the forests, blinked and looked around a bit. That's all we have had time for. We are still little more than beasts.

Comments

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

Alas, that's not what Noam Chomsky thinks. He claims that the average life span of a species is 100,000 or so years; after that, any environment will have changed too much for that species to adapt to it. For him, we're nearing the end of our run, and hastening it unnecessarily with environmental destruction, too.

Mmm, cheery words on a dank October morning. Sorry!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Well that may be the average life-span but really well-adapted species can go on and on and on.

Crocodiles, for instance, have existed, virtually unchanged, since before the time of the dinosaurs.