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HISTORY ‘starts’ not when we [humans] first appear [about 2 million years ago] but when we start to write. WRITING allows a record to be kept and a message to be transmitted down the generations. Before writing is ARCHAEOLOGY [early man], GEOLOGY [early Earth] and COSMOLOGY [ early everything]. Writing seems to have been ‘invented’ around about the time TOWNS were ‘invented’. And towns followed soon after AGRICULTURE [=farming] was ‘discovered’. All three ‘inventions’, agriculture, towns and writing, happened several times in several places, each time in ignorance of what was going on elsewhere. The most notable ‘breakthroughs’ [between 6,000 and 12,000 years ago] were in the places we now refer to as the ‘Middle East’ and the ‘Far East’. Where the breakthroughs were made, KINGDOMS, even EMPIRES rose and invariably fell but CIVILISATION [living in towns, depending on farming and trade and keeping a written record of what people got up to] persisted . . . and improved. RELIGION was an early ‘discovery’, predating civilisation but it developed rapidly, and (arguably) helpfully, alongside civilisation and became the ‘carrier wave’ for the moral ideas that still keep us (mostly) from each other’s throats. PHILOSOPHY came later and really is ‘all Greek’ [“ . . .all philosophy is a footnote to Plato”] and it helps us think very clearly and avoid telling too many unintentional lies. The Ancient Greeks [and probably the Ancient Chinese too] were smart enough to have moved quickly on to the Appliance of SCIENCE [the driving force of History for the last 200 years] but they didn’t bother [for various reasons, one of which was slavery]. Heron of Alexandria, for example, knew how to make steam move a wheel in the 1st Century of the COMMON ERA [= A.D.] but it wasn’t until the 18th Century C.E. [=A.D.] that Watt of Greenock [and not long after, Stephenson of Wylam] made Heron’s knowledge the basis of an INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION which continues to transform the World. History ‘ends’ when we [humans] disappear and that need not be soon but it just might be and then [barring a rogue asteroid] it will be our fault.
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