Blog 4 - A Glimpse of the Past

Good afternoon, dear students. In today’s possible the most boring blog of my teaching history, I will teleport to several moments in the past since these periods could possibly answer many of my questions regarding how certain things were created.

Babylon (4000 BC)

I have been always curious about the thinking process of building bridges. It’s such a mind-blowing thing, if you ask me, to connect one point to another by means of sturdy, heavy materials such as rocks, metal beans, clay, etc. and to not die in the process. If you ask me, it would have never occurred to me that through blending, cutting, adapting certain materials by following mathematical calculations would lead me to resolve this problem. As a matter of fact, the first attempts of creating these paths were done in the Babylon civilization. 

 

Old Stone Age (Paleolithic Age)

In one of my favorite podcasts, one of the podcasters mentioned that “depending on the dose, everything can be poisonous”. It was really shocking to hear that because it is actually true: all of us can agree that doing sports is a good thing, but when you overexercise your body till the brink of suffering lesions is bad; the same goes with work or other schemes. But I got stuck with the poison part. How did people notice that certain elements were poisonous? Did they test it on other humans? Or were they only true observants of others being affected by this element? Those are really unsolved mysteries for me. As far as the Internet tells me, the first people using poison for their own good were prehistoric hunters when they dipped their arrows in snake venom during the Paleolithic Age.

Conclusion

To finish this endless rambling of mine, I would say that, although I would have enjoyed being part of the thinking process of these past creations, by no means I would have lived in those time periods. Why? because, come on, it was such a hard life! I’m truly satisfied to learn all these inventions through the internet, while enjoying my hot cup of tea and watch Netflix later.

P.S: If any of you, future anthropologists or sociologists can give me a better answer to my curiosity, it will be greatly appreciated.