Whose History is it Anyway?

I’ve always loved history, especially ancient history. When I was in my early teens, I saw many of the Roman finds that were uncovered in archaeological digs in and around Chelmsford, Essex. At school, I did a project on ancient Egypt because I became fascinated after my grandmother shared stories about how her school teacher would read from the daily newspaper about Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun tomb in November 1922.

my grandmother’s classroom and teachers in the village of Headley, Hampshire. ( grandmother is next to the boy in the sailor suit)

Yesterday, I read an article online, that said university students were complaining about the talks they were given. This got me thinking about history, and what we are taught, or not taught in schools.

Here’s a quick lesson: Once the planet had settled down and the continents had finally stopped moving then life began to develop in the seas and oceans. From single-celled creatures that came out of the water all life on this planet began to develop; from the mosses, lichens and ferns all the way up to humans.

Every recognisable country on this planet has a history, but the people who live in these countries now might not be the original settlers. The earliest people of any given country are lost in the mists of time. Most of the races including our own aren’t truly documented as the earliest known writing we have dates back to 1250 Before Common Era, and this is an early form of Chinese writing. Archaeology can only give us an insight to our past, and even then it still very sketchy.

Timelines for when the first Homo sapiens or first known modern human appeared on this planet is a bit vague, but at a guess we are told it’s somewhere between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago. Then we hang around for about 100,000 to 70,000 years ago before setting off on our evolutional journey out of Africa. At that time, there wasn’t any borders or countries as we know them today. Humans, like animals and birds, were constantly migrating to search out resources to sustain their lives. As time went on, the once nomadic people began to settle into small communities. These were normally in areas where fresh water was easily attainable, wild fruits, and nuts were abundance, along with wild animals. Shelter was easily found or could be built quickly, with what was laying around, to protect them from the elements, or dangerous animals. Soon people learnt how to domesticate animals, create tools, and pots for storing food through the lean months. How to dig wells to find underground waters supplies. Of course, they found fire and learnt how to harness its power. As communities grew so the drain on natural resources drove people to seek out what they needed from further afield. This either led to trading surplus supplies with other communities or going to war with them.

So what has my brief history lesson been all about you might be asking?

Archaeology can’t tell us everything about the past. In fact, we are just looking through a telescope and seeing a tiny window and not the bigger picture. Ruined settlements, pieces of bone, scratched marks on stones, or even cave paintings may give us a hint of what these people were like, but they don’t give us all the facts. There’s so much we don’t know about the languages and cultures that evolved in the beginning and then disappeared altogether. If we were to step into a time machine the languages spoken today in any part of the world wouldn’t be understood by the people living in those areas three hundred thousand years ago. There’s much we don’t know like how their minds worked. What they believed in, or even how they interacted with each other, or those around them. It’s all guess work. We don’t really know what colour their skin, hair or eye colours were, we just assume they must have looked like the people who live now in the country where their remains have been found.

The problem with history is the same as the problem we have with information on the internet. We always need to check our sources, but if the information doesn’t exist, we can’t just make it up to serve our own perspective. History doesn’t belong to any one race and it can only show us the bigger picture, once we have a clearer understanding of it. In our modern world, even the people we see as primitive in comparison to ourselves might not give us a true likeness to the people who lived over 300,000 years ago. We have no idea what valuable information our early ancestors possessed in the way of medicine, or the understanding of plants, etc which has been lost to us.

The funny thing is we are waking up to the fact that for all our modern living, our life style isn’t sustainable. Are we not moving back to a plant base diet? Are we not like our ancient precursors migrating as we seek out a better life, or more resources. The only difference now to the past, is we have no where to go. The planet can’t sustain the number of humans indefinitely as we aren’t allowing our natural resources to recover from the damage we had done, or the pollution we have created in our throw-away societies.

It looks to me that maybe our ancient precursors were far more intelligent than us. The only things they left behind to tell us of their existence leaves no lasting damage on this planet. Maybe we should give them more credit as they have far more to teach us about sustainable living than we have done in this modern era.

Thank you for reading my post.