1s UPON A TIME By Richard Kerr Copyright 2011 Richard Kerr Smashwords Edition Smashwords Edition, License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or giveaway to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. Discover other works by the author on Smashwords.com Totally For Real http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/35270 1s UPON A TIME It must have started somewhere. Where, we don’t know. We reckon it was in Africa. When? It was at least 60,000 years ago, maybe more. Very likely it was during and ice age - though Africa was nowhere near the ice. All we know is that it began at a time when life was hard, brutal and short. Whenever, wherever it was, some prehistoric human took a flat piece of bone in one hand. Then they took up a hard, sharp object in their other hand. They looked at something. And then, (this is a big AND THEN), made a scratch in the bone to remember that something by. They started counting. That scratch today we call a 1. Somebody had to do it first. It need not have happened. That prehistoric person did not need to count to survive. They had enough problems to deal with every day. They did it to try and make sense of their tough life. Inside that prehistoric mind there was a link between three things: the real object they looked at, the imagined idea in their head that tomorrow could be better, the scratch in the bone. These three things have nothing obvious in common. It took a great leap of the imagination to join them up for the first time. Counting is probably the first and greatest invention. It was like the pebble that started the landslide. So big did that landslide become that caught up in it are all the arts, sciences and games of humankind. That prehistoric person deserves a statue. If he or she did not start counting you would certainly not be here today reading this book in your comfy surroundings. We have today, in museums, several of the ancient bones with lines of scratches in them. From the list above that is the only thing we do have. The first thing in the list – the objects – we can make a good guess at. The second thing in the list – why they did it – well, why else would they have done it? Whatever the truth it was held in the mind of the person who made the scratches. Any link between the three things died when they did, thousands of years ago. (If you look at the list above you will see the first thing is a real object. The second thing is an idea – something you can’t touch or see. Who knows what that was? The scratch, the number 1, the link, is somewhere between these two. Numbers are both real things and things in our mind. Or are they neither?). The scratch - we have that. The object we can guess at. Buy why, oh why, did they do it? That middle bit – what urged them on - is the key to understanding numbers. After all, that prehistoric person invented counting. If anyone can understand numbers surely they can. Not So Obvious. If counting seems like such an obvious thing to do then you ask yourself an important question: why did it take so long to happen? 60,000 years ago might seem a long time yet there were cavemen for around 1,000,000 years. These cavemen are properly called Neanderthals. They were very like us modern humans, but not quite the same. Their bones were larger and heavier, their muscles stronger. Their brains, however, were a just a bit smaller. Just a bit, though. They had tamed fire and they made stone tools and weapons. They were the main people of the Stone Age. They could do all this yet they spent 940,000 years not counting to 1. We call the Neanderthals cavemen but they rarely lived in caves. There simply weren’t enough caves to go around. They lived in the open too, in groups of around 50 to 100. They mostly ate meat so their lives were closely tied to the lives of animals. Bison, reindeer, red deer are all grass eating herd animals. These animals migrate – they stop on one place for a while, eat the grass and then move on. When winter comes the snow covers the grass so the animals move to warmer areas. During the spring they move back again to eat the fresh plants that have appeared from under the melted frost. Wherever the animals went, the Neanderthals followed. Very little of the Neanderthals remain but there is enough to have a good guess at how they lived. All the artefacts left behind by the Neanderthals tell a story. The object itself only tells less than half the story. Where it lay in the ground, how far down and what position it was in are far more important. (One thing archaeologists can’t stand is when ordinary people like you and me find dig up objects and proudly hand them into a museum. Leave them where they are!) There are fascinating things we can guess about the Neanderthals just from the arrangement of artefacts in the ground. When we find lots of stone pieces together there is a good chance it was some sort of settlement. So, going back to the question: why did something as obvious as counting take so long to start? There are clues in these Stone Age settlements. The answer isn’t in what we find there. The answer lies in what is missing. One thing missing is a hearth – a special pit to light a fire. We know they lit fires but they never dug a special hole for the campfire to be lit night after night. There are also no holes for tent poles in the camp – we’re thinking big holes for poles the size of a young tree trunk. So they never built even flimsy houses. Also, strangely, they never re-sharpened their stone tools. They chipped away at the flint to make a sharp edge. They used the tool. Then they threw it away. None of the tools dug up show the edge re-worked a second time. Lastly, and most odd, nothing discovered in the settlements came from far away. There are strange stones and marbles that don’t belong in the area and were brought there – but only from a few miles away. Never more than, say, 15 miles. That’s a day’s walk there and back. No one ever seems to have gone on a journey, leaving site of their family and friends, for more than a day. What does it all add up to? No hearths or permanent shelter. Throwing away tools and never travelling far. It all gives the impression that they had no sense of Tomorrow. They did not, or likely could not, imagine a future. They maybe had a feeling that new days were up ahead but they couldn’t talk about it. They couldn’t ask each other what the feeling might mean. Nor could they sit by themselves and have that conversation in their heads. That’s what a thought is – a conversation with yourself. It seems, after all, the Neanderthals had no language. They must have been able to think in images. Why would they have made stone tools otherwise? They must have been able to see an animal in their mind. Then they could picture the stone tool bashing the animal’s head. They could see cause and effect. They knew what causes led to the effect of fire. But anything beyond that was too much. So despite being around for more than 650,000 years – far longer than us modern humans – the Neanderthals never got round to doing something as obvious to us as counting. They just had no need to. Our Relatives. The people who came after the Neanderthals were our direct ancestors. Though it’s a bit of a grey area. Some people consider the Neanderthals to be human. Others consider them to be semi-human; a prototype: version 1. There is enough similarity between the Neanderthals and us to consider them as a type of human. But DNA tests show that there is no Neanderthal ancestry in us. We are descended from the people who came after. It is reckoned that these modern humans began from 100,000 to 70,000 years ago. They seem to have come from Africa. From there they spread through Egypt, across the little bit land that is the Suez and into the Middle East. They then spread outward across Asia and into Europe. They arrived in Europe around 40,000 years ago. The Neanderthals were still there and they lived side by side for about 10,000 years. It is tempting to think that during this time the new humans killed off the Neanderthals. After all they had bigger brains and better weapons. It seems they didn’t. Simply by having a healthier life and stronger babies the humans just expanded more and more while the numbers of Neanderthals just dwindled away. With the arrival of the humans there is an explosion in the different type of tools. This is still the Stone Age: the main stuff of technology is stone. The Neanderthal tools were mostly used for hitting and striking. The human tools could be used for cutting and scraping. They also used bones and antlers to make sharp piercing spears. When archaeologists unearth a Stone Age human campsite they discover all the things that were missing from the Neanderthal camps. There is a hearth dug into the ground as a place for fires to be lit day after day. There are large holes for tent poles. The tools are re-sharpened and just not thrown away. Most significantly there are objects that belong from far away. They also buried their dead. Some of these graves have skeletons surrounded by seashells – though the graves are several hundred miles inland. Did someone from the campsite walk to the sea to collect the shells? Or did a passing stranger bring them? Who knows? We like to believe a stranger brought them and traded them from something in return. To trade, to buy and sell, is a very old habit. Well That’s Culture, That Is. Isn’t it? What we do know is that the shells were purely for decoration. They fall in patterns around the skeletons in the graves. They were attached to clothes and these have rotted away leaving the shells in the place they were sewn on. Some were worn on a headdress. Some on a cloak. The shells have no use – but they have meaning. What could they mean? “I wear the special cloak therefore I’m the chief!” That’s one idea. Think how vicious a tiger is. But when it’s dead all that’s left is simply the skin and bones. If someone takes that skin and wears it, if they turn the tiger’s teeth into a necklace and hang it round their neck then they are giving those things meanings that weren’t there. This is totally unlike the Neanderthal tools we find. An axe is just that and nothing more than an axe. The humans made a very important leap beyond this. To give something a meaning, which the thing itself doesn’t have, is the beginnings of art and culture. It’s very hard to think of things today which are just themselves and are clean of other meanings. Medicine, I think, is one. A pneumatic road drill? The Hubble Telescope? We are very cultured. Nearly everything we make is covered in our meanings. Even something simple like a plain metal spoon can carry meanings. Is it a cheap spoon? Or an expensive one? What does it say about the restaurant you’re in? Or the life you lead? There was a time around 60,000 years ago when all this thinking was new. Tomorrow. Most striking of all the culture of the early humans was their cave paintings. Most of these painting depict animals – rarely humans. The animals are so well drawn that we can recognise them today. Strangely these paintings did not decorate the caves where the people lived. These paintings are deep in the uninhabited caverns, far away from the settlements. Sometimes there is a crawl of 30 metres through a dark tunnel to reach the cavern where the paintings are. The artist would have painted them alone by the light of a flaming torch. When they were finished others would make the dark journey to see them. Why paint the pictures so far away in the dark? They must be part of a ritual. What must have it been like to be taken on a journey by the artist through the dark tunnels, following the flaming torch held high. To crawl under and climb over rocks. To enter the cave at the end. To have the torch light help up against the wall and, behold! There they are. In the flickering orange light that passes over the painting are the animals: the bison, the elk, the deer and you will have to face in the hunt tomorrow. Tomorrow. To talk about tomorrow. To trade beads. To claim yourself chief. To organise a hunt. All these things need language. Once you start thinking about tomorrow then you have to start planning for tomorrow. You will also start thinking about how tomorrow can be better than today. Especially when life is hard. You have to start to understand the world around you. You have to make sense of it before you can control it. This is why those people, all those tens of thousands of years ago, began counting. It helps us make sense of the world. How does counting do that? A Group Activity. Why, when we stand in a forest, do we see trees? Because that is what a forest is made of, stupid. My bad. What I mean is why do we see trees and not a tree and another tree and another tree and another tree…? If we did look at a forest and thought about every tree, or if we looked at a field and saw millions of different blades of grass our brains would blow a fuse. It couldn’t cope. It’s just too much information. To save ourselves from mental collapse we cut out all the bits of information we don’t need. It doesn’t matter to me whether one tree has a gnarly branch or another one has smooth bark. No two trees are the same yet my brain cuts out all the differences and instead groups them together and call them all trees. This is a survival technique. We need to process information quickly. We don’t need to waste time thinking about things that are just too much and of no use. So our brains are wired this way. Its fascinating watching children learn this. Some toddlers mistake cats for dogs. In their head all hairy animals with legs belong in the group called dog. Then they learn that cats go meow and dogs go woof – so they form a different group for each. We all have these skills yet we all see the same world differently. I know next to nothing about trees. So all trees in the forest, to me, are in the group trees. A forester, on the other hand, not only knows all the different trees but also what state of health they are in. He would have many more groups than I would have – even if we’re both walking through the same forest. If you were to walk into your class or work place you would see the faces you know, Sally, Bert, Brenda, Elroy and so on. If were to walk into the same room as a stranger I would only see people. You would see individuals. I would see a group. There may only be a single Sally in the room. There mightn’t be another Bert. You would never ask ‘how many’ Sallys are in today. You have no need to count Sallys. She in a one off - she is either there or not there. If there is only one of anything we don’t need to invent counting. So everything in the world is different, everything is a one off, and we bunch similar things together into groups. Someone, all those years ago, saw a group of somethings. He or she believed that this group of somethings influenced their life. They reckoned they would get a handle on what it could possibly mean. Pattern Making. Most of the time we don’t bother counting at all. We just need to know things like; lots, many, few, gazillions, none. If I see a few ants on my sandwich at my picnic I’m happy to not bother counting them because I know enough already - a few ants won’t ruin my picnic. Likewise if the little blighters are swarming everywhere I don’t bother to count them as I know my picnic’s ruined. This is true for most of our lives. There’s either enough, or not enough, or too much. Often we don’t really need to know more than that. This was more true for our prehistoric bone scratcher. 60,000 years ago things were some what tougher. If you had food you ate. If there was no food you went hungry. There was never more than enough. Some people used to think that maybe a hunter made the scratches to count the number of animals they killed for food. But food came along so rarely that, like the only Sally in the room, a kill was a one off. It was never part of a group. All that those hungry people needed to know was that, today, they were eating. Whatever was being counted with those scratches it was unlikely to be things. The effort of counting everyday things was unlikely to help matters or change them for the better. There is one bone that has a group of 29 marks on it, followed by a gap, followed another group of 29 marks, and another. What happens in groups of 29 again and again? Something that a prehistoric person would see time and time again. The moon, of course. There is a new moon on average every 29.5 days. Before buildings and street lighting what could be more visible and ever-changing than the moon at night? The cycle of the moon, as it moves around the Earth is an event that appears night after night. There are many groups and cycles to be found in nature: the passing of a year, the arrangement of petals on a flower, the shape of geese in flight. Groups or cycles that appear to have some order form patterns and people are fascinated by patterns. We look for them everywhere – and even find them where they don’t exist. We find the shapes of countries in clouds. We see faces in rocks. We see animals in the stars. Many of these patterns, real or imagined seem to affect our lives. That spring follows winter. Or bad luck follows a black cat. The lines of scratches in bones also form a pattern; a pattern of ones. Instead of counting things it seems more likely they watched the patterns and cycles in nature and sought a way to understand them. That’s what our bone scratcher did all those thousands of years ago. He or she sat under a night sky looked at the phases of the moon and wondered what it all meant. They made a 1 for each day in the cycle. They took the pattern from the sky and brought it down to earth to hold in their hand. They looked and the pattern and thought about it and wondered if this pattern in the sky affected their life on Earth. They began to understand how the world worked. Then there was a chance that their tomorrow could be made better than their today. That is where it all started. And Finally. It is this great leap of imagination – taking the patterns of the world around and turning them into a symbol – a 1, which makes the first number such a powerful invention. It is what mathematicians still do today. They lay ideas out as numbers and then look for patterns in the numbers. We also have computer modelling where people look at the world and turn it into numbers. They then can hold the numbers, not in their hand, but on a computer which they use to try to understand how the world works. It wasn’t until the invention of farming that people started counting things. Those people lived for the very first time with surplus goods. There was suddenly more than enough. It was a very, very long time between the invention of the first number and the next number. Over 50,000 years in fact. Then we are taken to the beginnings of written history and the invention of the city. It was the Sumerians in the Middle East who invented, in 4000 bc, the Ten. That was followed by the Sixty. Sixty? Don’t ask me yet. That’s another article. Counting money, as you can imagine, played a large part developing numbers. In fact there are whole important chapters in the history of numbers that were driven by traders and merchants. That too is another article. To end this chapter: it should be obvious that early numbers couldn’t exist with out the invention of culture. The 1 was given meanings beyond a scratch in a bone. Pure mathematicians in our recent history have taken the meanings out of numbers. A 1 is a 1: pure and simple. When looking a mathematical equation these days it’s hard to believe there is any culture in it. In fact maths is described as the most ‘pure’ and ‘rational’ of the sciences. Yet, ironically, it is our obsession with turning the world into patterns and groups that drives mathematics. It is steeped in culture. ---oOo--- I hope you enjoyed this article. If you like fantasy stories that are supported by science then you might enjoy my book. Totally For Real http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/35270 This is a fantasy adventure about the white trash Watson family that get sucked into an online multiplayer game. It introduces ideas in artificial intelligence research, concepts of the mind and how we think of reality. But overall it’s a rollercoast romp as the Watsons seed escalating chaos into an advanced computer system.