Eternity. There is a wonderful illustration in the frontispiece of Hendrik Willem Van Loon's 1922 classic children's book The Story of Mankind. This still readable world history won the first Newbery Medal, and Van Loon was noted not only for his clear, crisp style but his evocative illustrations. The unforgettable frontispiece illustration is a full page drawing showing a person on skis standing at the edge of a snowy hill at night, looking out over a star-studded night sky. The only other feature in the picture is a distant row of snowy hills with stands of pine trees on them. The caption of this breathtaking litho-like sketch reads simply Eternity. and it is truly an instance of when a picture is worth a thousand words.
Van Loon's tale covers the past half million years, and begins by asking: "Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?" In the first 16 pages, including illustrations, the Dutch-born raconteur does away with the first 495,000 years of the story, spending the rest of the nearly 600-page tome on the story of how we humans have carried on (usually to our mutual discomfort) in the recent 5,000 years or so since we humans built large cities and figured out how to write, thus creating more durable records of who we were.
Nanapeel: There have been historians since ancient times--for example the Greeks Plutarch and Xenophon, or the Romans Livy and Tacitus. Some, like the Plinys, were veritable Renaissance men in the mold of the millennia-later Leonardo da Vinci. Our word history comes from the Middle English/Old French histoire, from Latin historia, from Greek historein, to inquire, from histor, learned man. The underlying concept of "history" therefore is not a flat recital of events, but an active process of asking or inquiring, with the implication that those who do so are by nature smart (learned). Editor's Note: Nanapeels are short excursions in word meanings that add extra zest to our entertaining and informational articles.
The skier of "Eternity" still stands there in Van Loon's illustration, in the same pose as when I first saw him (or her) as a child 40 years ago, or for that matter how Van Loon drew him 80 years ago, which is somehow comforting--how silly, to think that a figure in a drawing might actually stop leaning on his poles, maybe get hungry, maybe wipe sweat off his brow, and then disappear on quietly whispering skis into the dark woods of a long-ago Dutch childhood, leaving us to stare at the unchanged stars of a stranger's imagination.
As we behold the mysterious marvel that is the world we live in, which defines us--if we could only understand its hieroglyphs!--we have more questions than answers even now. One of the dark areas in our common knowledge is a longish chunk of time that stretches backward from when the fabled Egyptian sage Imhotep, later declared a god, supervised the building of the huge pyramids of Giza 5,000 years ago, to some hypothetical icy mountain range 11,000 years ago.
How long is long? The average person may live a full life of not quite a century if he or she is lucky, during which time we nurture two more generations of our kind before joining that long shadowy procession of mostly nameless and faceless (it's been estimated) 77 billion souls who went before us since the dawn of mankind, and that's been pushed back several million years, all of which we need not dwell upon here except to wipe our brow and make a sound like "whew."
We come into contact with objects, particularly in our disposable and artificial environment, that are a few years old at most before being discarded. The buying and selling of older objects not yet considered cultural artifacts by governments and universities is called the antiquarian business, and it goes on in places like Antique Row on Adams Avenue in San Diego or old State Street in the New Haven or a similar street in just about any city in the world.
Understandably, as objects become older they become rarer--because they break or get lost over the centuries, and because there were so many fewer human beings to make them and to own them in recent centuries. Which is why antiques become ever rarer and pricier.
That brings up an interesting fundamental point to keep in mind: namely, the exponential decrease of the human population as we look backward. A little help from the Penguin Atlas of World Population History helps us tell the tale. Today, we are about 6 billion upright bipeds wandering in and out of every nook and cranny of the world, often full of mischief toward each othe. If we go back a half century to about 1950 we find that there were half as many of us (3 billion) and when we go back another half century to about 1900 we find ourselves on an Earth that has just about 1.65 million human inhabitants. The chart continues to drop thus--an estimated 900 million humans in 1800, then 610 million in 1700, half a billion in 1600.
While Europe suffered plague, famine, war, and other privations during the Middle Ages, the overall human population rose from about 200 million at the end of the Classical period in 600 to the rise of the Modern period around 1500.
In ancient times, it's been estimated there were about 170 million humans at the time of Jesus.
Borrowing a page from Van Loon as we go backwards and skipping the rise of city states, the growth of agriculture, and invention of the metal plow, and much of what we call the Neolithic (new stone age), we zoom back to 11,000 years ago and find ourselves in the company of no more than perhaps 4 million of our kind.
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