Hans Comprix

I read 'Everlasting Man' for the first time last year... While I was waiting for another GK Chesterton book that got held up with USPS, I started trying to get some kind of better grip on what we know, and what inferences "we've" made, about prehistoric man. I started out reading about the 'cavemen' of 30-40,000 years ago, the guys that the book was mostly referring to when it spoke of 'prehistoric man' and 'cavemen' and whatnot. But then I started "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which I wasn't meaning to read through just yet. But man, it immediately grabbed me, I finished it a while ago and I'm still reading bits of it 2 weeks later. This book of course discusses the cave paintings in Europe, but the truly interesting stuff that I really don't recall having heard before, is about the mass migrations of mankind going back not just 40,000 years but hundreds of thousands of years and that these people were sailing! I really had no idea and don't recall hearing that mankind was sailing on ocean voyages up to 1 million years ago. That just blows me away. And not just "mankind", but even Homo Erectus, with brains half the size of modern man, were sailing these migratory voyages too! It's ridiculously amazing! While the man or woman or people were painting those beautiful horses in Europe (and this takes nothing away from them) the ancestors of Australia's and New Guinea's aborigines were freaking sailing open ocean voyages and colonizing every isolated island that could inhabit life throughout the Asian Pacific and Indian Oceans. It's utterly amazing. I'm just amazed by prehistory. And while books like Everlasting Man calls some of what we've been taught to believe about prehistory and prehistoric man into question with some reasonable criticisms, it is such an amazingly vast subject we just simply cannot know what the hell we're talking about half the time as far as I can tell - but I wouldn't dare to think I have enough of a clue to really have an 'informed' opinion either way, but I have been trying (off and on) to get to some semblance of one. This book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" was so much better than I had expected and it really inspired me to learn about all this other stuff. I'm curious but also exceedingly bored lately, but learning about this stuff has made this dreary winter a little more bearable for me. Anyway, If you'd like to be blown away by what we do know with some degree of certainty about prehistoric man, I recommend you check this book out. I didn't even mention the amazing firsthand witness accounts of the conquest of the New World, the kidnapping of more than one New World Emperor of vast peoples with vast armies... We're talking 120 guys with arquebuses that fired 1 round per minute if they fired at all against armies of 50-80,000! Say what you will of the 'conquistadors', those dudes had maybe the biggest balls in human history (modern human history, that is). Just getting on a ship in the age of exploration in itself required balls of steel, (The odds of suffering a horrible death of starvation, thirst, scurvy, shipwrecks, etc etc were outrageous); but what they did once they landed in the New World is simply breathtaking, I'm not condoning it by any means - just saying.. That's a whole other post, I had actually intended to talk about that first, because the conquest of the New World was far crazier than I realized. Check out the book and you'll see what I mean.