Skip to content

How Young Is History?

2017-01-17 · explainer · John · 3:41 · watch on YouTube

Topic: History & curiosities · mode: Personal essay

Comparing the 1,900-year-old Pantheon with the Lascaux paintings (15-20,000 years old) and the far older Chauvet paintings, John argues that history is not a line of progress: almost everything we take as natural or inevitable is very new, so our progress is fragile and today's conditions result from choices we make together.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The Pantheon: its age, Hadrian, continuous worship, and how different life was 1,900 years ago

  • ★★ John calls the Pantheon the world's oldest building still in use (depending on definitions), finished around 126 CE under the Roman emperor Hadrian. (hedged) — 00:00:00
  • ★★ John says Hadrian's most famous statue was recently found to be a forgery: his head was put on someone else's body 1700 years after his death. — 00:00:11
  • ★★ The Pantheon began as a temple to the Roman gods, became a Christian church in 609 and still is one: people have worshipped there for almost 1900 years, so long the gods changed. — 00:00:21
  • ★★ When the Pantheon was built there was no English language, and Romans ate no pizza because tomatoes reached Italy only 1500 years later. — 00:00:32
  • ★★ Then a phenomenally wealthy traveller needed four days by carriage and 350 denarii, about a laborer's yearly wage, to get from Rome to Florence; today it takes about three hours by car. — 00:00:41

00:01:00 — The Lascaux and Chauvet cave paintings and their ages

  • ★★ The Lascaux cave in southwestern France was (re)discovered in 1940 by four teenagers and a dog named Robot; it is famous for nearly 2,000 prehistoric wall paintings, including extinct animals and a bird-headed person. — 00:01:01
  • ★★★ We don't know how many generations painted at Lascaux, but carbon dating and other methods show the paintings are mostly 15 to 20,000 years old. — 00:01:19
  • ★★ Cave experts found another cave full of paintings 350 kilometers away in 1996, the Chauvet Cave. — 00:01:30
  • ★★ John says the Chauvet paintings are in many ways more sophisticated than Lascaux's, with more action and implied motion, and arguably more detailed. (hedged) — 00:01:39
  • ★★★ Most Chauvet paintings date from 37 to 33 thousand years ago, a few from 31 to 28 thousand, so the gap between Chauvet and Lascaux roughly equals that between Lascaux and now. — 00:01:50
  • ★★ The Chauvet paintings were made across thousands of years, so the cave was almost certainly used by one community for longer than we have used the Pantheon. (hedged) — 00:02:15

00:02:28 — History is not linear progress: what seems natural is new and fragile, and results from collective choices; sign-off

  • ★★★ John says we like to think history moves in a line from naive to sophisticated, short lives to long, poverty to abundance, but the idea that history means progress is very new; most of the 250,000-year human story looks like a sine curve. — 00:02:28 · progress
  • ★★★ Whatever progress we have made toward justice, equality or shared prosperity is fragile because it is new. — 00:02:49 · progress
  • ★★ Everything new around us, from broadband internet to Italian tomatoes to the Pantheon, occurred in the last 1% of human history. — 00:02:56
  • ★★★ John says much of what we think inevitable or natural about humanness isn't: not wealth inequality, climate change or polarization, but not literacy, free speech or a three-hour Rome-Florence trip either. (hedged) — 00:03:02 · economic inequality, climate change
  • ★★★ These conditions result from our collective choices: every day we choose what to value, worship and paint, and future humans will know us by the choices we make together now. — 00:03:25

In the description and comments

  • ★ The description thanks Rosianna for helping with all the images. — video description · Rosianna Halse Rojas
  • ★★ John recommends Werner Herzog's beautiful documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams for much more on the Chauvet paintings and the people who made them. — video description

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: cave painting · Chauvet Cave · Lascaux · Pantheon, Rome · progress

Also: People: Hadrian

Concepts: climate change · economic inequality · English language · freedom of speech · historical determinism · literacy · political polarization · tomato

Places: Ancient Rome · Florence · France · Italy · Rome

animal: Robot

Only in the description or credits: Cave of Forgotten Dreams · Rosianna Halse Rojas · Werner Herzog

Also centred on cave painting: One of the Most Important Images On Earth

← Previous: Top 10 Best Dogs Ever · Next → Behind the Scenes of My Life