BIG HISTORY

By: Ashley Majano

The Day The Universe Changed

Our culture is based on learning information and making sure each generation carries it on.

We see the world as we do because of the knowledge we were taught.

We tend to take things apart in order to learn about them, it’s how we study everything.

The Day The Universe Changed

“The only constant is change”

We have a need to constantly be learning, we are “insatiably curious”, which causes problems at times because people can’t simply let things be without needing to understand them.

Not all things change such as marriage and the traditions that go with it.

Every society has a type of understanding each other, how things are done, and what is allowed.

The Journey of Man

Spencer Wells, a geneticist, has been following the work of a colleague to use human blood to trace humans back to our very first ancestors.

Found only in males, the Y-chromosome holds a small mutation that links all humans together and shows a common relation.

50,000 years ago humans evolved and the very first family came from Africa, the Bushman tribe today still holds the same DNA proving the link.

The Journey of Man Blood samples show that after

Africa, humans traveled to Australia and others to Europe.

Due to different climates, humans began to adapt by changing skin tones to absorb more sunlight and vitamins.

The amazing information showed that some people traveled up to Siberia and then crossed over to Alaska, which is where Native Americans came from.

Catastrophe

Tree rings have been studied for many years and the information learned from them can be used for various aspects in history.

An interesting speech caught David Keys’ attention when he heard that trees had very narrow rings in the year 535 A.D. and 542 A.D. which meant something in the environment caused a climate change at that time.

After checking with other countries, he learned that there was a global climate change that lasted a few years and he went on to study what could have made such an impact to the Earth’s atmosphere.

Catastrophe

Keys explored what could had such an affect on the world and after ruling out asteroid and comet, he came to the conclusion it was a volcano named Krakatoa.

In ancient stories, loud noises and bright lights were recorded and debris samples were tested.

The volcano’s explosion was so massive that the ash went up into the atmosphere and spread out covering the entire world making the climate significantly cooler.

Guns, Germs, & Steel

Jared Diamond is a professor at UCLA of geography and physiology but he spends a lot of his time studying birds in Papua New Guinea.

He was asked once by a resident in New Guinea why white men had so much cargo compared to them. At the time Diamond had no answer but after extensive research he has found what might be the cause.

When humans migrated across the continents they took the risk of searching for better lands but that wasn’t always what they found and certain lands held much better crops and animals than others.

Guns, Germs, & Steel

Diamond found that the people in the middle east had crops such as barley and wheat and animals like cattle, horses, and pigs. All of this gave them a heavy advantage over other countries. The area became dry so they migrated horizontally out to Europe and Asia which is why those civilizations grew so much faster than others.

Those places were able to focus on how to improve life rather than focusing on where to get food because the food was so bountiful.

They created weapons out of steel and guns which helped them overtake less developed civilizations and if their weapons didn’t kill them then the diseases they brought with them did the job.

The World & Trade

Columbus left home at the age of 25 and sailed in the year 1492.

Pierre d’Ailly had already given the explanation that they knew the Earth was round because in Lunar eclipses the shadow projected is round.

Centuries before Columbus, during a global warming trend, the Norse boldly ventured forth, sailing from Scandinavia to Iceland and then to Greenland.

The World & Trade

In the 1490’s the Portuguese did reach India, the place Columbus was aiming for.

Portuguese settlements were always vulnerable because they were not self-sufficient, most survived only because they were obviously too weak to threaten major land powers so nearby kingdoms felt free to feed the Portuguese in return for safety at sea.

Historically, goods considered drugs, that is, products ingested, smoked, sniffed, or drunk to produce an altered state of being, have been central to exchange and consumption.